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When Linda Haugevik, an agent at Sotheby’s International Realty, put North Haven’s six-acre Strongheart estate on the market in July for $65 million, there were those who accused her of being on “hallucinogens,” she said.

In other words, even though the property belonged to the actor Richard Gere and his wife, Carey Lowell (who have since filed for divorce, according to the tabloids), it was perceived by some as overpriced. Nine months later, the price has been reduced to $56 million.

The Arc House, a residence on Green Hollow Road in East Hampton that is a kind of glamorized Quonset hut will be featured Sunday on the Travel Channel.  Designed by Maziar Behrooz, an East Hampton architect who just opened an office in Manhattan’s Flatiron district, the nearly 5,200-square-foot structure is made of corrugated steel and held up by 14 “ribs.”

When Paul Rice, an architect who has designed houses throughout the South Fork with his partner, Ward Welch, for 25 years, purchased a house at 78 Meeting House Lane in Amagansett in 2008, he set to work gutting it and adding 1,200 square feet. The timing couldn’t have been worse.

Plans were for a 4,500-square-foot, updated gambrel-roofed traditional but construction, which only extended to the exterior of the house, was stopped as the market dove south. The interior is framed, but unfinished. 

While we’ve all been snowbound these past weeks, some intrepid souls have made pilgrimages to BookHampton in East Hampton for diversion. Kim Lombardini, a manager at the shop, shared with us winter’s most popular reads.

FICTION    
“The Goldfinch,” Donna Tartt’s anxiously awaited third novel published last year about a boy who loses his mother in a terrorist attack in an art museum, takes its title from a painting of a bird the boy filches as he flees the wreckage. At a hefty 771 pages, it is selling like hotcakes.