LOCATION: Sagaponack, NY
PRICE: $18,995,000
SIZE: 7,000 square feet, 8 bedrooms, 9.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: It may not have the publicity ensuring $65 million asking price of Richard Gere's postcard perfect 6.3 acre water front compound in the low-key Hamptons enclave of North Haven, near Sag Harbor, but veteran music industry mover and shaker L.A. Reid's landlocked 3.27 acre estate in sleepy but supuh-swank Sagaponack ain't exactly real estate child's play with its $18,995,000 asking price either.
Property records show the song writing record producer and his former school teacher second wife, Erica,* scooped up the gated estate in February of 2006 for exactly $10,000,000.
The gray-shingled, multi-winged mansion, set privately at the tail end of an unusually long (shared) driveway that cuts across active farm fields, measures in at about 7,000 square feet, as per current listing details, with 8 bedrooms and 9.5 bathrooms, including five en suite guest/family bedrooms and a two-level master suite. (Is that the master bedroom, children, the room with the extra-deep tray ceiling and a gigantic boob-toob on the goddamn floor, smack in front of the wood-framed glass sliders that otherwise provide access to the outdoors? Seriously? Well, that's just plain silly. Master bedroom or not, a person can't even watch the thing proper if they're laying down on the bed. The angle is just too severe. Anyways...)
There's a partially paneled formal living room that's just about perfect for late afternoon/early evening cocktail parties. Triangular clerestory windows surely fill the room with the exact sort of ambient late-summer light for which the Hamptons are beloved by Hamptonites. Listing photos show a baby grand piano where, just maybe, one of Mister Reid's many famous entertainer friends have tinkled the ivories while sophisticated ladies and gents in linen pants sip champers in front of the strikingly minimalist fireplace. Opposite the fireplace there are lighted cubbies for the display of objet d'art (or whatever) and a trio of wood-framed glass doors allow for an easy transition to a large deck with backyard vista. Any of the children who might be invited to a cocktail thing at Mister and Missus Reid's house this summer would be wise to take note of the two dangerous looking sprays of twisted twigs in identical clear glass vases set on the identical coffee tables.
The dining room has a long table with 10 Vladimir Kagan chairs, some sort of upside-down, pagoda-shaped fabric chandelier of the likes we've never seen before, and (vexing) large scale contemporary paintings. One painting depicts a giant letter Q and the other is a rather disturbing portrait of a man who looks like he's violently shaking his head side to side. We know art is a very personal thing and we're 100% positive some of y'all would poo-poo at least some of the art Your Mama and The Dr. Cooter have in our house but that is not, no siree Bob, a painting Your Mama would not want to look at throughout an entire Thanksgiving Day turkey meal.
Less formal family quarters include a den with fireplace and a cook-friendly center island kitchen fitted and kitted with two-toned Shaker-style cabinetry, sleek stainless steel hardware, and high-quality stainless steel appliances that include at least two dishwashers and a built-in microwave oven.
The wood ceiling in the family room has a dramatic, steeply pitched vault spanned by heavy duty, A-shaped beams and trusses. The track lights affixed to the trusses don't make us feel great in our decorative soul but we swoon for the way the architect has floated the beams away from the ceiling. A (slightly off-center) fireplace anchors the far end of the room that's furnished with a lot of low, lounge-y semi-chaise sofas and slipper chairs. There's a flat screen television mounted on a long wall sheathed with a stacked stone treatment and, on the opposite wall, a series of over-sized wood-framed sliders open to a big deck with expansive view over the back yard and adjacent farm field.
Listing photos show a spa space on the mini-mansion's upper floor that may or may not be part of or directly accessible from the master suite. The spa room is complete with a giant terry cloth sofa, a massage table placed in the center of the room, an inversion contraption back in the corner, and, on the back wall, a semi-portable-looking free-standing dry sauna that gives Your Mama a screaming case of claustrophobia just to look at. We do, of course, adore a sauna as much as the next Norwegian but that one looks like the sort of thing in which panicked young girl with a dying cell phone battery would try to hide in a straight to DVD horror movie. Next thing you know, the heat goes up and up and up, the door won't open, and the murderer steams her like a soup dumpling at Joe's Shanghai. But we digress.
Other luxuries at the Reid's Sagaponack summer home include a meditation room, finished basement level that contains a gym, a temperature controlled wine cellar lined floor-to-ceiling with built-in bottle racks, and—according to this article in Hamptons magazine—a drum studio.
The fully manicured estate has high hedges on three sides but is open on the south flank so it can take advantage of the preserved views over the fields and an oblique view of Sagaponack Pond. Besides the spacious porches and decks along the many sides of the back of the house, outdoor recreational amenities include a Har-Tru tennis court almost completely obscured by trees, a pergola shaded viewing platform, a small pond, and a heated saltwater swimming pool and spa nestled into a man-made tumble of boulders.
Other Sagaponack home owners with recognizable names include—but are far from limited to—paper mogul Peter Brant and his supermodel wife Stephanie Seymour and Real Housewives of New York's resident minor European royal by marriage, LuAnn de Lesseps, whose house is right next door to writer/director/producer/actor Bob Balaban's summer spread. Billy Joel and his third ex-wife, Katie, used to own a couple of ocean front cottages at the bottom of Gibson Lane and esteemed writer Kurt Vonnegut owned a house on Sagg Main Street for more than 30 years. Sagaponack's largest estate, as every one who knows anything about real estate in the Hamptons knows, is owned by billionaire industrialist Ira Rennert who recently requested permission from the city to add a 633 square foot Pilates studio to one of his two pool houses at Fair Field, his still quite controversial 63 acre ocean front mega-compound that already encompasses more more than 110,000 square feet of seaside opulence.
Mister and Missus Reid seems very much in the mood to lighten or at least shake up his portfolio of residential properties. In addition to his spread in the Hamptons, the couple also own a modest townhouse type condo in Atlanta, GA as well as a 5,000+ square foot apartment on Park Avenue in New York City that—some of the children may recall—they listed on the open market in early May (2013) with an asking price of $18,900,000.
With both his New York area residences up for sale, Your Mama wonders where Mister and Missus Reid plan to set down their next real estate roots. Will they return to Atlanta or will they decamp for the west coast? Or are they simply selling out and upgrading or downsizing? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
*Mister Reid's first wife was Pebbles from TLC.
listing photos: Sotheby's International Realty