At Home in a 19th-Century Sagaponack Barn

While much grander houses have sprung up around it in the 53 years since Tinka and the late Bud Topping transformed an 1811 barn in Sagaponack into a family home, none of them speak as much to place and history.



Mr. Topping’s family roots in Sagaponack stretch back to the 17th century, and the house is on family land where he grew up farming potatoes with his father.



“I used to see this road and say, that is the most beautiful road,” Ms. Topping recalled late last month. “It was my idea of perfection.” The area is much changed in more than half a century, of course, but in many ways it remains a little slice of perfection, with the ocean shimmering beyond the road end to the east and still ample farm fields part of the patchwork to the north and south.



When the couple were married in 1963, they looked at first to buy a house “that was within our means — which was zero — and had three bedrooms,” Ms. Topping said. (She came to the marriage with three children, age 4, 8, and 11, and they had a fourth a few years later.)



“One day Bud said, ‘Let’s just move the barn up.’ ” Mr. Topping was still in potatoes at that point, although he was to make a switch to horses, and the operation had outgrown the small, 19th-century barn.



It was common enough on the South Fork to move buildings from place to place, but the Toppings were the first in this area to convert a barn into a house. Still, Ms. Topping said she knew as soon as her husband suggested it that it would work “because of the light,” an asset that is immediately obvious to anyone visiting today, where a tall, south-facing window that took the place of barn doors bathes the living room in a distinct Sagaponack glow.



“It sounded so perfect to us,” Ms. Topping said. “He had the vision. . . . Bud was very independent. He’d do anything he wanted to do. He was very idiosyncratic.”



The house was moved down what the Topping family calls “the Bunny Trail” by a man Ms. Topping remembers only as the Egg Mover — “Bud had a name for everybody.” Ed Hildreth, whose ancestors likely  built the barn back in 1811, was hired to add a kitchen and a bedroom, two stalls became bedrooms, and “we were upstairs in what had been a hayloft” reached at first by a ladder, Ms. Topping said.



Eventually a staircase replaced the ladder to the loft bedroom, which remains intact. One of the ground-floor bedrooms was expanded into a master bedroom, which now has a spacious master bath and French doors that open onto the pool patio. A guest bedroom was added on the north side of the house later. In its finished form, the house is around 2,000 square feet and has five bedrooms and four baths.



Original oak barn beams, with adze marks on them, can be seen throughout the main part of the house. The construction date of 1811 on one beam stands as an evocative reminder of the house’s more humble past. “I love the beams,” Ms. Topping said.  



When her youngest daughter, Jenno, was little, a swing hung from one of the living room beams, and though she lives today in a big house of a different style in Santa Monica, she has a swing in her living room there, too.



A big plaster fireplace in the tall living room recalls the adobe Ms. Topping was fond of, and it fills the room with hearty warmth on winter nights. A second brick fireplace warms the kitchen, where a large table made for the family by a neighbor seats at least 10 comfortably. The kitchen opens to the living room, for dinner party overflow.



Family photographs fill almost every inch of wall space in one hallway. Work by well-known artists and friends, like Sheridan Lord, Priscilla Bowden, and John Register, shares the walls with paintings by grandchildren. The furniture and objects prompt stories about those who collected or presented them over the years. Almost every window and door, some of which are original to the barn, and every corner of the house draw out memories.



Today the house is filled not only with reminders of its long-ago past but with its more recent history as a magnetic and welcoming gathering place for an ever growing family, including 11 grandchildren, and a large circle of friends.