Issue #48, March 9, 2007

AN APOLOGY TO IRA RENNERT OF SAGAPONACK

By Dan Rattiner

I’d like to apologize to Ira Rennert. He came into this town around ten years ago, bought a piece of land and built a house on it for he and his family. And that’s all he did. Today, you hardly hear anything about him. He’s a nice fellow, apparently, and a good neighbor. But at the time, everybody in Sagaponack, which is the community where he built his house, demanded he be prevented from building what he did.

Everybody was wrong, and that included me.

The hard time given to him by everybody else — and none of it was ever said to the man directly, because he arranged his life so he never had to speak to anybody directly if he didn’t want to — was because it appeared he was building a hotel. Or worse. Some sort of religious retreat. All in a peaceful community zoned for farms and private residences, and not for hotels or religious retreats.

What made them think that? Well, the plans for the house indicated that there would be 29 bedrooms, about the same number of bathrooms, parking for about 22 cars in a garage and about 100 in a lot, and there would be a poolhouse, a beach house, a screening room, a tennis house, a caretaker’s house, a recreational house, a guard house, and all sorts of other fun things you might see at a hotel or religious retreat.

When the project was first presented, it was looked at by the building inspector, who might have rejected it if he thought it was a hotel or religious retreat. He concluded it was going to be a private residence.

Rennert was about 64 when he began planning for his palace. He expected it would set him back about $40 million. And he had this to say when he started.

“This is to be a private home that will be enjoyed by me and my immediate family.”

He wrote this in a letter to the editor of the local newspaper.

When the project was completed eight years later, which was in 2004 when he was 72, he wrote another letter.

“I built this big home because I wanted to be sure that my children and grandchildren would come visit me and we would all have a good time.”

Personally, I always believed Ira, because I looked at the plans and they indeed did look like the plans of a private home — a very, very large private home of about 110,000 square feet, on the ocean, probably the second or third largest private home in the country, but a private home nevertheless.

My objection to the project was that I thought it would change Sagaponack. And I thought that was a very, very bad thing to do.

When he started, Sagaponack was a stunningly beautiful community of potato farms, four miles long and three miles wide. There were only a few houses. And there were no hedges or fences. From wherever you were in Sagaponack, you could see the whole of it from end to end, a grand carpet of green potato plants extending from the Montauk Highway all the way down to the sand dunes at the beach.

You could actually breathe it in, a pungent smell of sea spray, fog, turned earth, green plants, fertilizer and sunshine. Bridgehampton Loam, as the dirt was called in this part of the world, was among the richest and darkest anywhere. It was perfect for farming.

Into the middle of this, on a parcel of 63 oceanfront acres of potato plants, a farm was to be turned into a palace of Renaissance buildings that would look like they had been put there by an Italian Duke. If you know the style from the 19th century, known as Italianate in northern Italy, well, that’s what Rennert had in mind to build.

It will put an end to the magnificent views throughout Sagaponack if he builds this, is what I thought. All you will see is these buildings, all fenced in, completely disrupting the peacefulness of the potato farms on both sides. It will be the end of Sagaponack. What a thoughtless thing to do.

Well, he went ahead and built it.

The other day, I was down with a New York friend at the Sagg Store, the only commercial building on the little Main Street there, and she asked me if we could drive around and have a look at the home of Ira Rennert.

“I’ve read so much about it,” she said. “Could you show it to me?”

So we went out for a drive to have a look and we drove around and around and I said it’s in here somewhere. And finally, we found a dirt road where you could have at least a glimpse of it through the woods. And that was it.

One of the very first things Rennert’s workmen did in 1996, when they started this construction, was to strip off all the beautiful Bridgehampton Loam with bulldozers and send it off in trucks. Then they brought in their own special topsoil and created a whole forest on the property — it is 88 acres — with the palace in the center. You can hardly see it.

For the eight years it took to build, the house and the land around it was indeed a mess of dirt and construction material and workmen and it surely did disrupt practically everything normal about Sagaponack. But then it was done. The trees bloomed. The grass grew. The guards at the gatehouse let in who they wanted to let in, and the whole thing just disappeared.

But as it happened — and this had nothing to do with Rennert — all of Sagaponack changed. One by one, the farms were sold to developers who cut them up into housing developments — five acre, million dollar lots for the wealthy — who then came in and built their own giant mansions — midget mansions when compared to the Rennert house, of course — but 10,000 square feet nevertheless, and these new residents planted hedgerows so you couldn’t see up the driveways and they could have their privacy, and that was the end of rural, green-carpet Sagaponack.

It was going to happen anyway. And so my objection didn’t hold true at all. Sagaponack was not ruined by Rennert. Sagaponack simply changed — while Rennert was building — to the NEW Sagaponack and as it happened, Rennert now blends right in.

Today, Rennert is in residence, in his house with his family and his friends, and it is not a hotel, and it is not a religious retreat, it is the private palace of a rich industrialist, in the grand American tradition of such homes. It is the largest mansion in the Hamptons by far and one of the largest in the land, nestled where you can’t really see it in the artificial, grandly landscaped and gardened and mowed forest of what is now the new Sagaponack.

Well, who’s to say what’s artificial? Three hundred years ago, when the first farmers came in, Sagaponack probably was all forestland. And there was probably a newspaper editor back then, objecting to all the farmers tearing all the trees down to put in the potato plants.

So now the forest is back. And the potato farming view to the horizon is no more, which, incidentally, was very likely a very good reason why everybody, including Rennert, wanted to come out here.

Which brings us to what happens next. Time marches on. Someday — and I wish him long life — his palace will have to become something else. There will be nobody around who will want to pay the huge maintenance bills for such a vast project. And so it will cease to be a private residence.

What shall we do?

We can’t let this fall to ruin, the historians will say. It is a historic treasure.

We must open it to the public, some politician will say. Make it a museum. It will bring much needed revenue to the community.

And so, finally, the public will wander through, gawking at all the antique furniture and the oil paintings of the great man himself, mounted over the carved fireplaces. Ira Rennert. He fulfilled the American dream.

“Would you like to contribute to the upkeep?” a volunteer from the Rennert Historic Trust will say as you leave the premises shaking your head in wonder. “Every little bit helps.”

“Rennert?” a local will say to a tourist in a station wagon. “It’s around here someplace.”

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