Gatsby’s getaway

The beach at Southampton

It is the evening of July 10, and a party tent has been erected to form a dome over 40ft trees. The event’s guests of honour: New York philanthropist Beth Rudin DeWoody and the artist Ross Bleckner. Soon the likes of fashion designer Donna Karan and Dorothy Lichtenstein will be dancing to the tracks of DJ Tom Finn, best known for spinning at the Clintons’ millennium gala at the White House. The tickets tonight are $1,000 a head; the cause, the nearby Parrish Art Museum, looking to raise $25m.

For a town with a population of 4,000, this may seem excessive but Southampton, along with the other towns on this Long Island strip, form the Hamptons. The VIPs who summer here pack an almighty punch, their seasonal presence concentrating more celebrity, wealth and influence than anywhere else in the US. Steven Spielberg, John Paulson, Calvin Klein, Paul McCartney, Ronald Perelman – the list of names with Hamptons houses could fill more than this article’s word count. Polo parties, Gwyneth Paltrow-hosted Kabbalah events, fundraisers for New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand: these are the daily doings between Memorial Day (the last Monday in May) and Labor Day (the first Monday in September), the unofficial brackets of summer season in the US and the period in which the Hamptons come alive.

Each village has its own flavour: Southampton is traditional and waspy; East Hampton arty; Montauk wilder; Sag Harbor and Shelter Island lower-key. One thing, however, speaks louder than others: money. Nick says of Daisy in The Great Gatsby: “Her voice is full of money.” And Daisy lived just up the road. Fictionally, yes, but she and her manse would be at home in the Hamptons of now. Being just two-and-a-half hours by car from New York and half an hour from East 34th Street heliport, this district is easy to get to. It comprises more 19th- and 20th-century shingled houses than Gatsby-esque piles, and old-world charm is the rule. The towns are understated, picture-postcard pretty and discreet – it’s the living embodiment of a Ralph Lauren advertisement and, unsurprisingly, he and his three children have properties here.

How has the financial slump affected property here? Do the mega-rich even care? The general consensus is that they do, and prices have dropped between 20 per cent and 30 per cent from the high of 2007.

I meet real-estate broker Whitney St John Fairchild to look at properties for sale. Whitney worked for Ralph Lauren for many years, before she and husband James Fairchild sold their place in town and moved permanently to the weekend house in Sagaponack. Whitney knows every back road in town and every secret of the big names living here (which she refuses to divulge).

As commissions are much higher in the US (6 per cent) than in the UK (2-3 per cent), brokers are happy to share deals with other brokers, and when things are priced in the tens of millions, one can see why. We ride in Whitney’s vintage Mercedes convertible for a tour, from the sublime to the more sublime.

Robert Benton’s Georgica Pond house, on the market for $30m

Two properties new to the market stand out. The first is three-time Oscar winner Robert Benton’s Georgica Pond house – opposite Spielberg’s. Its views, over the pond and on to the ocean beyond, with 724ft of water frontage, are mesmerising. I’m in love with his place, its three acres, perfect pool and open and light house, simply but elegantly decorated: on hearing the price tag of $30m, I concede that it’s beyond my reach.

Then, on a more modest level: a house in Sag Harbor, a village which has an all-year flavour rather than being just a summer playground. It’s what they call a “fixer-upper”, but is in fact a gorgeous structure on half an acre, with plenty of room for a pool. Though configured at present as five self-contained apartments, it could easily be converted to a single residence and happens to sit on Sag Harbor’s most prestigious street. At $2.5m it seems a steal for a house of 3,000 sq ft.

The market is definitely starting to move again, and there’s a sense that the procrastinators have already missed the bargains. The crazy prices being paid in 2007 were unsustainable, as Harald Grant of Sotheby’s Southampton brokerage explains: “The peak was emotional buying. I want it, I pay. Now it’s much more conservative, it’s a numbers game and people are looking at costs to build and maintain.”

A $2.4m ‘fixer-­upper’ in Sag Harbor

Barbara Bornstein, of Sotheby’s (Bridgehampton), adds: “Buyers have gotten their confidence back, and we’re very busy. It’s almost a perfect tipping point with sellers realising now is a good time for them, so they’re serious and pricing their properties effectively.” To that end Christie Brinkley, a habitué of the Hamptons scene and a serial property owner, has just put her house in North Haven, close to Sag Harbor, on the market for $15.75m – it sits on four-and-a-half acres and is a Greek revival house dating from 1843. Her former husband, Billy Joel, who is in the midst of his third divorce, has also put his beachfront property in Sagaponack up for sale. I drive by and find a 5,000 sq ft structure on one acre of land with direct ocean frontage and views. But $22.5m for a charming, if not lavish beach house? Aspasia Comnas of Brown Harris Stevens explains: “Oceanfront and other waterfront properties are always in demand and those owners are less negotiable on pricing. They may even increase their pricing if they view the demand as strong.”

The equation is simple: south of the highway your property is worth 50 per cent more than north. And every 50ft you creep towards the ocean, prepare to write a disproportionately larger cheque.

Every day on my six-day visit here I’ve taken a two-hour beach walk that I’d have liked to last forever. On my final day, thinking of the astronomic prices of the houses I’ve glimpsed, and in some cases glided through, I get it. The Hamptons are beautiful, charming, manicured, with the impeccable gloss of money, but what sells it all is still the beach. Like anywhere else the market will be affected by global markets, but a prime property here is a rock solid investment. I’m sold.

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Details

Whitney St John Fairchild, Saunders Real Estate, tel: +1 631 680 7097, wfairchild@saundersre.com

Peter Turino, Brown Harris Stevens, tel: +1 631 235 9098, pturino@bhshamptons.com