Postwar Modernism

After the Second World War, a small group of architects used the South Fork as a testing ground for modern houses: flat, shed or sharply angled roofs, walls of glass and plywood or vertical wood, and plans raised or pinwheeled toward the view. Many were low-budget weekend houses. Few have any legal protection, a number have been demolished, and the survivors are often small houses on land now valued for a much larger one. That gap is the main fact a buyer or seller has to price.

This page also covers the beach houses of Andrew Geller. They share their period, architects and preservation problems with the rest of the group, and the sourced record does not support a separate page.

How to recognize it

• Roofs. Flat roofs (the "flat-roofed cubes" of Peter Blake and Gordon Bunshaft, in Alastair Gordon's phrase), single-pitch shed roofs, or tilted forms. Geller's Pearlroth House is a box-kite-like pair of "diamonds."
• Walls. Large areas of glass alternating with solid panels. Peter Blake's Pinwheel House used glass and white-painted plywood panels that slide on metal tracks. Wood is common: vertical cypress on the Neskis' Chalif House, cedar siding inside and out on Gwathmey's Amagansett house.
• Plan and section. Living spaces lifted a floor for views (Gwathmey), split into separate pavilions joined by a deck or breezeway (Chalif), or opened in four directions (Pinwheel).
• Scale. Small by present standards. Gwathmey's original house was 1,200 square feet and the Pearlroth House about 600.
• Local references. Some of these houses borrowed from the old South Fork. Gordon writes that the Chalif House combined Japanese temples, New England saltboxes and the geometric modernism of Le Corbusier and Breuer, and that its shed roofs were set to match the height of neighboring houses.

Where it concentrates

The documented houses are spread out rather than clustered: Water Mill (Pinwheel House), Sagaponack (Geller's 1955 Reese house), Westhampton Beach and Dune Road (Pearlroth House), East Hampton Village (Chalif House), and Amagansett and Bridgehampton (Gwathmey and several Neski houses). Gordon counts more than 25 Neski weekend houses in the Hamptons.

Documented examples

• Pinwheel House, Water Mill (Peter Blake; completed 1954). Built as a vacation house for Peter Blake's family. Listed in the Docomomo US register, which records modern buildings but is not a legal designation. Private residence.
• Reese House, Sagaponack (Andrew Geller, 1955). Budgeted at $5,000 and built for $7,000 furnished, according to the Geller archive. Destroyed in a March 1962 storm.
• Pearlroth House, Westhampton Beach (Andrew Geller, completed 1959). The "Double Diamonds." About 600 square feet. Enlarged in the 1970s, then moved 40 feet inland and restored by COOKFOX, with a new, much larger house built on its original site.
• Chalif House, East Hampton Village (Julian and Barbara Neski, 1964). Two shed-roofed pavilions with cedar-shake roofs and cypress walls. The Neskis later designed an addition to it themselves. The East Hampton Star reported in 2025 that it was on the market and at risk of demolition.
• Gwathmey Residence and Studio, Amagansett (Charles Gwathmey, 1965). A 1,200-square-foot house organized vertically, with a 480-square-foot studio added a year after completion and turned 45 degrees to it. Cedar siding inside and out.

Renovation, demolition and review

This is where postwar modernism differs from the older styles. Gordon wrote in 2025 that early modern houses by Peter Blake, Norman Jaffe, George Nelson, Gordon Bunshaft and Andrew Geller had been demolished over the previous twenty years. The Research Desk found no local landmark designation or National Register listing for any house named on this page.

What the codes say:

• Town of Southampton. The Landmarks and Historic Districts Board's automatic review covers demolition and construction for structures built before 1941, plus recognized historic resources. A 1950s or 1960s house is outside the age trigger unless it has been recognized. Landmark designation is possible. One criterion is the work of a designer whose work "significantly influenced an age." It requires the owner's written consent.
• Town of East Hampton. In the Amagansett Historic District, buildings constructed after 1950 are classed as nonhistoric. The guidelines say an addition to a flat-roofed house there "may be in the same modern style." The Bluff Road guidelines say the same for any non-historic house. Town-wide, the Architectural Review Board encourages gabled roofs and cedar shingles where it has jurisdiction. The code also says the board may not use review to prohibit or unduly restrict alternative building types, materials or methods.
• Village of East Hampton. Landmark criteria include the work of an architect of local or regional importance. A modern house inside one of the four village historic districts goes through the Design Review Board like any other.

For a seller, a documented architect is a marketable fact. Without designation, it is not a legal constraint on the buyer. For a buyer who wants to keep the house, the practical questions are structural (these were often built cheaply), coastal (some sit on or near dunes) and zoning: whether an enlargement can be done as a separate pavilion, as the Pearlroth and Chalif histories show.

What the assessment roll does not tell you

New York's style list has a "Contemporary" code, but it is a broad bucket, and on the South Fork records the Research Desk has reviewed the style field reads "Unknown." Whether a house is a documented 1950s modern house is a question for the architect's archive, the press record and the building file, not the roll.

The roll's year built can mislead in both directions. The State manual keeps actual year built, effective year built and year remodeled as separate fields. A 1960s house with a 1990s addition, or a house moved on its lot (as the Pearlroth House was), may carry a date that matches neither the original design nor the current structure.

Related: Contemporary Modern, all style guides.