By the time William Richmond-Watson purchased a rambling house in Sag Harbor, N.Y., in 2013, the interior had been altered significantly since its construction in the late 18th century.
“It was broken up into six different apartments,” he says, “and an addition had been put on the back in the 1980s.”
But the history was still there. The house was built by John Hulbert, a ropemaker-turned-lieutenant colonel in the Revolutionary War’s 3rd New York Regiment. His claim to posthumous fame is memorialized in a bronze plaque outside the house, which reads that his militia detachment “designed and carried the first stars and stripes as their official flag during the Revolutionary War.”
Whether that’s actually true—the Suffolk County Historical Society, the current home of the aforementioned flag, uses the language that it’s “believed by some to have been made” by Hulbert—the house has an unquestioned place in the firmament of the Long Island town’s history.
So as Richmond-Watson began to contemplate how he’d begin to return it to single-family residential status, his experience heading his own creative agency, Watson & Co., came in handy.
“I feel so fortunate, because my business over the last 15 years has meant sitting with architects like Rem Koolhaas, Annabelle Selldorf, Norman Foster. I’ve worked with all of them from the ground up,” he says. “It permeates your design consciousness.”
After three years of planning, Richmond-Watson embarked on a three-year renovation, which extended for an additional year or two after he bought a small adjacent lot and built a guest house. “It was always going to be a project, that was the idea,” he says. “It should have happened a bit faster than it did, but the timing has worked out quite well.”
Today the completed main house has five bedrooms and 4 1/2 baths on 4,000 square feet of interior space. The guest house has an additional 1,000 square feet and an additional full bed and bath.
The problem, though, is that its primary residents are just Richmond-Watson and his young daughter, “but we’ve created this large family compound,” he says. “It’s probably a bit big for my daughter and I at this point.” In an effort to downsize, he’s put the house on the market with Rylan Jacka of Sotheby’s International Realty for $11.5 million.
Down To The Studs
Richmond-Watson bought the original property for $1.75 million, according to Zillow Group Inc.
“This was when Sag Harbor was not at all fashionable,” he says. “I hate to think what the house in its original state would cost now.”
At the time of his purchase, the home was “falling apart—charming, but definitely falling apart,” he says. “It hadn’t been well-maintained, and when the previous owners did upgrades, it was inexpensively done.”