Relay: All By Design

I’m a sucker for aesthetics. I’m the kind of guy who would live in a modernist glass cube because it looks cool, no matter how inconvenient. I judge books by their covers and products by their packing and I would rather have a mediocre dinner at a chic restaurant than good food from a dive.

East Hampton is a great place for the aesthetically motivated. It’s beautiful almost everywhere you go. And for a weekender, it looks like utopia. I would think that the people on the local boards and improvement societies are as aesthetically motivated as I am because they are doing a great job making the town look good. But after living here full time for eight months, I’ve started to see that aesthetics can be deceiving. 

The Village of East Hampton is made to look old. That’s because many of the buildings in town are old. And the rest of them are designed to carefully match the village’s charming aesthetic. The signage is restrained, the store windows are tasteful, and the sidewalks can make you feel like you are strolling through a town of yesteryear. This is all by design; the design review board regulates almost every aesthetic detail of what a storefront can and cannot look like. But what it doesn’t regulate are the kinds of companies that fill its highly manicured village. Inside a building that was designed to house, say, a cobbler’s shop or a mom-and-pop toy store is an international corporation with headquarters far from our quaint little village. Behind the perfectly vintage facades are companies that use our town for P.R. and close their doors once the New York folk leave for the season. 

If the local boards spent as much time thinking about how the village could work for the community as they do thinking about how it looks, I think East Hampton could be as successful as it is beautiful. 

Levi Shaw-Faber is an associate editor for The Star’s East magazine.