Technically, the house that Chris Mitchell and Pilar Guzmán have put on the market in Bridgehampton, N.Y., was built in 1902.
But when they bought it in February 2019 for what Zillow lists as $7.1 million, “unfortunately it had been renovated in that perfect Shelley Long, 1987-era style,” says Mitchell, who was the chief business officer for Condé Nast’s culture division until January 2020. “They had all these ideas like ‘let’s have a red living room and a scalloped pink sink and a black bathroom and mirrors on everything.”
The previous owners, he continues, “took every part that was historically authentic out of the house and put in the plastic, hollow-core door version that still read ‘historic’ but was still every bit 1980s imitation.”
But Mitchell and Guzmán, the former editor-in-chief of Condé Nast Traveler and current co-founder of the social platform the Swell, were up to the task of resuscitating the building: They’d renovated multiple properties before, both in the Hamptons and in Brooklyn, and “loved the process from the beginning to end,” Mitchell says.
And so, with the help of Anne Sherry, an architect based in nearby Sag Harbor, the couple began a project to dramatically expand the home while reinjecting it with a patina of historical accuracy.
Now, almost exactly two years after they bought the old home, the new 12,000-square-foot, 10-bedroom house is complete and listed with Frank Newbold and Beate Moore of Sotheby’s International Realty for $28.5 million.
“Between now and when we sell this house, in my ideal world, something perfect will come on the market,” Mitchell says. “That way we can move on to the next project.”
The History
The house sits on 2.3 acres on the corner of Quimby Lane and Ocean Road, about a three-minute bike ride from the Ocean Road beach. The original house on the property was built in 1700, but it wasn’t until the late 19th century that the inventor Edward Everett Quimby (whose genius for inventing things was shadowed only by his ability to patent those inventions) bought the lot and more than 30 surrounding acres and subdivided the land into a family compound.
Parcels were subsequently sold off, though the family retained several others for more than a century; last year a nearby house reportedly owned by the Quimby family sold for $11 million.
Mitchell and Guzmán’s house, in contrast, changed hands a few times over the decades, and was rented out, Mitchell says, to someone who “had some connection to SNL” and who, Mitchell discovered, had epic parties. The aerialist Philippe Petit apparently walked the roof line, and “John Belushi did illegal substances on the side of the pool,” he says.