Tear Up

You've Heard of Tear Downs? In a Bad Economy, Here's a Tear UP

By Dan Rattiner

If a developer buys a little cottage in the Hamptons and tears it down to build a giant mega-mansion on the same property, what do you call the cottage? You call it a tear down, of course.

From that perspective, what is going to happen in the next few weeks or month can only be called a tear up. Somebody in Southampton just got a permit to pull down one of the biggest mansions in the Hamptons to put in its place something "more manageable," which is another way of saying "smaller."

It should also be said that the people and property involved in this are bigger than life. The property in question was originally built as the 64-room oceanfront summer home for Henry Francis du Pont. This was in 1926. The person who wants to - and now has the permission to - tear it up and put in something smaller is Calvin Klein. Thus do economic hard times play themselves out in the Hamptons.

I don't think there is anyone around anymore who can tell us why the du Ponts wanted to build an oceanfront home with 64 bedrooms. But they did. The plans for it - and they are still in the Southampton Town Hall - not only show the rather boring Georgian exterior of that original structure, but also show where every single stick of furniture should be placed in every single room. It might have been due to the quirkiness of du Pont himself. But it was a great guideline for the staff. If they move something, they would know to put it back. If they would take something - well, under the circumstances this was out of the question - everybody would know right away.

"Chesterton," as the du Ponts called it, may not have been the biggest mansion in the Hamptons at that time, but it certainly was the one with the most bedrooms. It was made of poured concrete with brick facing. It wasn't going anywhere.

Sometime in the late 1960s, the du Ponts stopped coming out to Southampton in the summertime. They had many other homes around the country. "Chesterton" fell into disrepair.

In 1979, a man named Barry Trupin bought it at auction. I attended that auction, which took place right in front of this gloomy and abandoned home in the fall of that year. Trupin did not attend. He sent someone in his place to attend. And the mansion was not bought in his name, but in the name of a corporation expressly made up for the occasion of buying the property. In other words, it got sold - for $300,000 - and nobody knew who bought it.

Indeed, even after it was determined that Trupin was behind this, still nobody knew who he was. That he had tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars available to tackle this project was understood, but he kept his business affairs, developed through a maze of interlocking corporations, pretty close to the chest.

Soon, Trupin surfaced. He was an affable and religious fellow who intended to put a synagogue sanctuary inside his mansion for his daily prayers. And he had bought the mansion to please his wife, Renee, the beautiful daughter of an American Army officer who had served in military bases around the country. She wanted to be part of Southampton society. He intended to build the former du Pont estate into a French castle on the ocean for her. He would name it Dragon's Head, and it would have turrets, towers, suits of armor, tapestries and French and Italian sculpture. He also would build, attached to the building on the west side, a giant aquarium, where you could snorkel and scuba amongst the fish by the hour, watching all the goings on underwater, including the pride of the aquarium - three sharks.

Southampton society pretty much declared war on the Trupins. The turrets went up, and Southampton Village issued a stop work order on the house. The turrets were too high. The society members of the Town shunned the couple from their private clubs. Southampton society did come, however, to an enormous medieval ball that they threw on the property because they were in any case very polite and proper, but after that, it was back to the cold shoulder.

The battle about whether they could make the vast modifications to this house went on for three years. The stop work order was never lifted. Finally, Trupin sued, citing his civil rights. If Southampton Village lost this lawsuit, they would be bankrupt. They lost. They appealed. They won the appeal on a technicality. And so, the Trupins packed up and left, with the castle unfinished. Trupin told me he would put it up for sale, but would only sell it to poor people so they could use it for public housing. The Trupins never came back.

But the house did get sold. Brokers sold it for the astonishingly small sum of $2.3 million to the elegant New York City developer Francesco Galesi. Handsome and suave and with a European accent, he and his wife and children, unlike Trupin and his wife, were welcomed into Southampton society.

Galesi made this oceanfront palace his family summer home for 10 years, until about 1999 when, the story goes, someone mentioned to him that what he had paid $2 million for could now fetch $15 million. It made Galesi think. And soon thereafter, he sold the mansion to Calvin Klein for about that price.

Galesi had toned the unfinished castle exterior down by taking the turrets down and building granite quoins on the corners that, along with a huge wall of granite boulders up on the property line at Meadow Lane, gave the property a grand and unique appearance. Inside, he changed little, though there were never any sharks in the aquarium. It did become an indoor swimming pool, with islands of rocks in it, however. But the gutting of the building that Trupin had commenced, from 64 little bedrooms to 16 giant ones, was left as was.

Klein had a grand and fashionable party on the property to celebrate his new acquisition. The waiters, carrying the hors d'oeuvres around, were young, very buff men, naked from the waist up, but otherwise fashionably attired. It was quite a party.

I really don't know why Klein has decided to tear the place down at this particular time. He had covered the exterior walls with ivy when he moved in, and it did give the home a more academic look, if that were possible. He also had the granite wall removed. He is, after all, a master fashion designer. He knows what he is doing.

In any case, whether the cost of heating the place in the winter had gone through the roof (as it did last year) or whether he just felt it was time to put his own stamp on the property, he approached Southampton Village about a month ago about taking the whole building down and replacing it with something quite a bit smaller. Last week, they approved the application.

How this will be done will be something to see. The du Ponts built it to last forever. And forever can be for a very long time. But, it should be said that if they can take down a hotel in Las Vegas with a few strategically placed charges, I suspect they can take down "Chesterton."

With it will go its history. But then, there will be something new. And with it, a new history. The owner is, after all, Calvin Klein.

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