Garden in a Bottle

ARTIST PAULA HAYES, Brooklyn-based creator of fantastical landscapes large and small (some so small they can be worn as necklaces), is speaking this Sunday, Feb. 14th, at Madoo Conservancy in East Hampton, on what sounds to me like a wonderful winter subject: terrariums.

Hayes’s star has been rising since she first began getting attention for her blobby silicone planters. A year-and-a-half ago, there was a New York Times article exploring the evolution of her own garden in the backyard of a Boerum Hill brownstone.

In recent years, Hayes has been building delicate horticultural universes, often including crystals, in biomorphically shaped, handblown glass vessels. She had a show last summer at the Marianne Boesky gallery in Chelsea, where giant versions were displayed on pedestals and smaller ones grouped in a rooftop array.

I don’t expect Hayes’s Sunday lecture will be a homey how-to on making terrariums as a hobby to get us through the winter [she wrote as she watched the snow continue to steadily fall...] But I’ve been thinking terrariums myself and wanting to try my hand at making one. I have an old pickle jar under the sink and a bag of potting soil at the ready.

With these for inspiration, maybe I’ll do it.

East Hampton Winter Survival Guide

I HAVEN’T SEEN STATS, but the population around here drops precipitously in winter, probably to not much more than the 20,000 recorded in 2000 by the U.S. Census Bureau (that includes East Hampton, Springs, Wainscott, Amagansett, and Montauk, a 25-mile-long swath). Traffic dwindles to nothing, you can park right in front of wherever you’re going, and you don’t need restaurant reservations, even on a Saturday night. The vaunted Hamptons scene just evaporates, and I’m fine with that.

The big homes of summer residents sit silent and empty along the ocean. Up here in Springs, there’s more of a year-round population, but it’s still laughably sleepy. The last car to go by my house was probably 30 minutes ago. Yes, it’s quiet in February. Not that I mind.

But if one does want to do something for not very much money, there are a lot of options. Consider the following:

• I’ve mentioned the East Hampton Trails Preservation Society, with their regular 3-to-7 mile rambles on Wednesday and Saturday mornings at 10AM, and challenging monthly 10+ milers. The Feb. 10 hike (which could well be snowed out) holds the possibility of seal-sighting along the rocks off Montauk. Feb. 13 takes in saltwater marshes and historic structures in the backwoods of Amagansett. Intriguing, yes? The hikes are free.

• Gurney’s Inn, the un-glitzy Montauk resort and spa, has a $175 winter pass good for 10 visits, with access to the Olympic size salt-water pool (wonderful to swim in – soft and buoyant), sauna, steam, and so on. The usual day rate is $30. You can sit by the pool and read or gaze out at the ocean for hours, from the comfort of a chaise longue.

• Rowdy Hall, below, is a pub with a fireplace tucked away behind Main Street’s shops. On Tuesdays at 12:15 in winter, they have a brilliant high-concept reading group. Instead of having to read an entire book, which has always felt to me like homework, this group reads and discusses a short story: a classic of literature chosen by Bookhampton’s Mary Braverman. Chekov’s coming up, and James Joyce, and more. You don’t have to eat, but should you choose to, the food is good and comforting (mussels in cream sauce, roast chicken with pureed root vegs).

• There’s yoga for a dollar a day at KamaDeva Yoga; their $90 pass for 90 days of unlimited yoga is on sale ’til April 1. The studio is in a serene, high-ceilinged room; there are 26 weekly classes to choose from, and the instruction is excellent (that’s Mitten of Yoga Over 50, right). Free guided meditation on Sundays from 3-4.

In a bid to keep restaurant tables filled in the low season, prix fixe and happy hour are the names of the game.

• Nick & Toni’s, legendarily lively in summer, is fairly hushed in winter. The winter draw is Mediterraean menus – a four-course meal including aperitif for $38. They’re working their way through France, Greece, Morocco, and Portugal in turn. There’s also a 2-course prix fixe for $30 that includes a voucher for the Regal multi-plex in East Hampton, so you can do dinner and a movie for $30 (if you don’t drink, of course).

• Few East Hampton restaurants are open 7 days in winter, but Della Femina, below, the top-rated place in town, is. Their 3-course prix fixe is $25 Sunday through Thursday, $30 weekends.

• Citta Nuova is modern Italian; I like their white pizza with wild mushrooms and friendly bar. They have a Monday-Friday happy hour from 4:30-6 with $5 quartinos and Thursday night Italian wine-tasting, $15 with bar food.

• The Living Room, the chic bar/lounge at c/o The Maidstone Hotel, features $5 Stockholmipolitans (cosmos, Swedish-style), below, on Wednesdays from 5:30-8:30, and complimentary smorgasbord.

This list is by no means comprehensive. I’ve just given you my own small, biased sampling (I left out the karaoke). There are art courses, bird watching, writing groups, knitting groups, photography workshops, live jazz at the Wolffer Estate winery, and much more. You’ll find complete listings in the East Hampton Star.

Guest Room Re-Do

THIS COMING WEEK, I’M SLIPPING IN A RENOVATION PROJECT that wasn’t even on my priority list. The roofer remains elusive, and I can’t do the parking court until he’s done. I can’t do the deck/outdoor shower until April at least, because the area beneath which I plan to put the 400-square-foot deck is filled with ferns that were the most satisfying part of the landscape when I got here last May, as well as 75 daffodil bulbs, chelone (turtlehead), and astilbes. (I’ll move all that elsewhere, but can’t do it until the ground is good and unfrozen.)

Like a shark, I’ve got to keep moving forward or else I’ll die. Or so it feels. So on Tuesday, a contractor is coming to fix up the 2nd bedroom, or guest room, in my East Hampton cottage. He’ll install a new window I happen to have in the basement, above (custom-made for another house and never used), along the longer wall, which I expect will make the 7-foot-wide room feel much more pleasant. He’ll remove cruddy molding, a damaged ceiling from a long-ago roof leak, and replace the old, wallpapered-over sheetrock and baseboard.

It will also make the house look a whole lot more interesting from the outside.

I’m kind of dreading the whole operation, to tell ya the truth. It’ll last most of the week. It’s been very cold here, and the exterior wall in that room will be open for at least a few hours. And then there’s the dust. But hopefully the satisfaction of accomplishment will trump the inconvenience.

And now the roofer is saying he may also come this week. Chaos!

Woodworks

Above: Alex Scott Porter, a New York architect, created this stacked log wall for a house in Amagansett.

I AM THINKING OF BUILDING AN OUTDOOR WALL out of something I have in abundance: cut logs. There are six or seven piles of them dotted around my property, left by the arborist who cut down several large trees last fall — oaks, mainly.

He took away the very largest pieces, but cut up the branches, about 6″ in diameter, into sections a foot or so long, thinking I could use them for firewood. I haven’t yet installed a fireplace (let’s not go into that again), but I sure have a lot of firewood.

Below: From :Duncan’s Flickr photostream

Meanwhile, I’ve seen pictures of interior and exterior walls made of stacked logs in various books and magazines (and websites) and love the way it looks. Generally, they’re made of very uniform logs, which mine are not. But it could be an interesting approach to creating a sound-insulating barrier along the road at the front of my property. I’ll need a wall fifty feet long and four feet high. Not sure I have quite enough logs to do that, but I’m planning to get started when the weather warms up a bit and see how far I get.

Below: From Hartp’s Flickr photostream

I’m a big believer in using free found materials. And if it doesn’t work out, and I do eventually get a fireplace, well, I’ll have the firewood.

Above: A path made of sectioned logs at Madoo, the two-acre garden of artist/writer Robert Dash in Sagaponack, another artful way to recycle cut-down trees.

Solid Cobble Hill 4-Family, Ask $2M

THE SNARKY COMMENTERS over at Brownstoner have been making fun of this townhouse in prime Cobble Hill, which just went on the market for $2million. Why? Mainly, it seems, because it would cost a bundle to turn the four-story, four-family into a one- or two-family, and because it has a fire escape on the back. That makes it, says one commenter, little better than a tenement. (Better a fire escape than a sprinkler system, which is a horrendous interior eyesore. Anyway, all brownstones over 3-1/2 stories have fire escapes; at least this one’s on the back.) And of course, the Brownstoner crew thinks it’s overpriced.

I guess it is, a bit. Still, it’s a decent deal, especially because it could probably be had for under the asking price. It’s not elegant, granted, in its present state, but boy, would it be a worthwhile income-producing property in years to come, left more or less just as it is. At the present asking price, and with rents a bit soft these days, the numbers don’t quite crunch out. If you figure 1BR floor-throughs are worth $2200-2400/month in that neighborhood, or potentially $9,600/month in rental income, and you happen to have $350 or 400K lying around for a down payment, you could come close to break-even, and you’d own this solid building on a venerable historic street (Clinton between Baltic and Kane, which hasn’t changed in 150 years, if you don’t count the cars going by).

I called the listing agent to find out if the building was to be delivered vacant, and to get more pics and info. Yes, it’s vacant. It’s a legal 4-family. The owner is elderly, the house has been in the same family for decades, and the price is negotiable. It is in excellent mechanical condition, with pristine but dated kitchens, like the one on the garden level, below (picture it white with a black-and-white checkerboard floor). I like the 1940s bathrooms with the pedestal sinks, by the way, and the long parlor windows are intact.

On the minus side, the taxes are high for NYC: $7,616/year. And the building is smallish: 20′ wide by only 36′ deep.

It probably won’t last long; fifty people people showed up at last weekend’s open house. At today’s interest rates — the broker I talked to said she closed a deal recently at 4-1/2% — and considering the intrinsic value of an 1860s townhouse in that location — it seems worth exploring.

What do you think? Would this brownstone be a reasonable investment at this point in time? Personally, I’d love to own this building. If only I had $350K lying around.