Relative Value

Earlier this week-end I attended a wonderful lunch and property tour with Saunders, our highly impressive Hamptons partner. As always, I was both fascinated and amazed by how extraordinarily expensive real estate remains on the East End of Long Island. Many of the properties are exquisite, and at $1500 and up per square foot, they rival Manhattan co-op prices. The three L’s of real estate, never far from my mind, leapt to the forefront as I toggled between Southampton (Friday to Saturday morning) and our home in Sharon in the northwest corner of Connecticut (Saturday night to Monday morning.) Here in the Litchfield Hills, you can buy a gorgeous estate with substantial acreage, a pool, and a large antique house for the same price as a spanking new 2 bedroom, 2 ½ bath condominium in Sag Harbor. It’s all a question of the ever-moving target of relative value.

Of course, waterfront property commands the highest prices today (it was different a century ago, when East Hampton was still quite a simple town but the wealthy were constructing enormous “cottages” in the Berkshires.) But that’s not all. The indefinable question of social cachet hovers over all these questions of value. Why should the Hudson River views enjoyed by residents of Riverside Drive be less valuable than those of City Island or Queens seen from the windows of apartments on Sutton Place? Why should the spacious family apartments of West End Avenue command less than their brethren on Park Avenue? It’s not the architecture, or the proximity to parks and shopping. It’s perception. Value is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder, more often than not, values what he or she perceives as being valued by others.

I remember my astonishment, years ago, at visiting an acquaintance in East Hampton who said she never went to the beach. Nonplussed, I asked what then the advantage was of the arduous, traffic-phobic drive, the crowded restaurants, the hordes of people, the fancy shops most of which were also available in New York? Her simple answer: everyone is here.

Actually many of our friends week-end in the Hamptons as well. The light and sea air remain magical, as do those extraordinary miles of beach where the sound of the surf lulls even the most active brain into quietude. That said, I am profoundly grateful for my house in Sharon, where property values don’t hold a candle to the East End of Long Island and almost certainly never will. Fancy people mostly don’t come here (Carolyne Roehm and Anne Bass aside.) It’s easy to get a reservation just about anywhere, just about any time. Helicopters don’t whir constantly overhead, though hummingbirds and herons do. Traffic never impedes or influences any decision we make.

For us, the purchasing power of our dollars and the combination of sophistication and independence which Litchfield County offers made it the most attractive choice. We chose Central Park West 40 years ago (before it became Central Park West, the street of dreams of today) for many of the same reasons. For me, having grown up on Park Avenue spending summers in East Hampton, I wanted to strike out in a different direction. In today’s Manhattan you can choose Park or Fifth, CPW or West End or Riverside Drive, Tribeca or Harlem, Park Slope or Ditmas Park. You can spend your summer week-ends at home in the city, in the Hudson Valley or on the Vineyard, in Sagaponack or in Maine.  Some choices cost more, some involve more travel, more patience, or more people. Value is relative; it’s all a question of what works for you.

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