Tracking the “Hampton-ization” of the North Fork

Call them North Fork fancy: They like to shop, throw catered parties and ask their decorators to compose clean yet beachy interiors — but they choose not to be in the Hamptons.

It’s not news that as such weekenders have discovered and invested in the area, home prices have climbed, high-end hotel proposals have become legion and restaurants have gotten more gourmet.

Still, each summer brings new hints that the still relatively sleepy part of Eastern Long Island could wake up and find itself turned into its neighbor, the Hamptons — as well as some indications that it may escape that fate.

$1 million-plus 

The real estate market is the first giveaway that there is money here.

By February of this year, 79 out of 116 single-family homes on the market in Southold Town were listed for over $1 million. In that town, which along with part of Riverhead Town comprises the North Fork, the median home price climbed over $900,000 in early 2023, nearly double the 2017 median of $565,000.

The pandemic housing blitz hit the North Fork strongly, broker Scott Bennett of Douglas Elliman said. 

The area was already trendy, and the buzz finally reached a critical mass of metro New York City residents looking to buy a second home. 

Waterfront properties with views are in demand, especially in the hamlets of Peconic and Southold, Bennett said. But not just any such properties. Top-end buyers “are particular when it comes to aesthetic and design,” Bennett said.

Though the frenzy has subsided and price growth leveled out, there are still bidding wars. One in five homes goes for above asking, according to the Miller Samuel quarterly report for Douglas Elliman.

Relatively low housing inventory — Southold Town only spans 34,000 acres, much of it landmarked for preservation, with a population of just under 24,000 people — means expensive teardowns are becoming more common.

On Calves Neck Road, a bayfront street in Southold with deep-water docks, one house sold for $3.1 million in fall 2022 to be torn down and replaced with a brand-new build. 

Kristy Naddell, also of Douglas Elliman, said new construction will continue to be in high demand.

“Off-water properties here on the North Fork are trading for numbers we never saw before,” she said, pointing to a new home on just shy of 4 acres that sold for $4 million without being waterfront, a record for the area.

The most expensive home currently listed on the North Fork, for $7.8 million, boasts 8 acres on Southold Bay. In the Hamptons, there were 72 sales above $5 million just in the second quarter, according to Miller Samuel.

Lifestyle update

Interior designer Debbie Gildersleeve is the owner of Renee’s, a clothing and furniture boutique in Mattituck that her mother founded in 1978. 

The area, she said, is “suddenly cool” to live in for her adult kids.

“We saw a huge influx during the pandemic, and there’s so many more younger people here now and it’s more upscale,” she said. “Customers have gotten more sophisticated.”

Nine in 10 members at the North Fork Country Club, where Gildersleeve said she used to know everyone, are now strangers to her.

At the store, newbies “appreciate the finer things, and service,” she said. “They want their summer house done before they come out for the season.”

High-end restaurants continue to come, including one out on a Greenport pier called the Shipyard, and longstanding fixtures are getting updates, like nearby Claudio’s, where the new executive chef has added sushi, modernized the seafood menu and raised prices.

Lauren Lombardi opened Lombardi’s Market on a pretty strip of Love Lane in Mattituck in 2014. She has watched as the entire hospitality industry has “stepped up the experiences they are offering customers, like creating wine-pairing dinners at wineries,” she said, and extending the tourism season all year.

“We’ve never been busier than this summer,” said Lombardi, who also runs a catering service. 

“The weekends are crazy — there are so many places that are trendy now, and customers are constantly inquiring about catered home parties.” 

Demand for private chefs on the North Fork has also increased.

“They want to bring people out from the city and entertain, and take advantage of all the beautiful locations,” she said. 

The word has gotten out on aspirational Hamptons-centric social media. On a recent weekday, the $20 million Next Chapter yacht was docked in Greenport.

Even prominent blogger Arielle Charnas switched up her normal Hamptons summer weekend with a recent boat trip to Greenport, according to her Instagram.

Several boutique hotels are in planning stages, including Jonathan Tibett’s the Enclaves. Ground has been cleared at the property on Southold’s Main Street for the $44 million project, which is slated to become the most luxurious hotel on the North Fork. Tibett is also a partner in the Shoals Hotel in Southold, which launched in 2022. In Greenport, Alexander Perros is adding a restaurant to his newly renovated Silver Sands hotel. 

The new projects will join a handful of boutique hotels that have opened on the North Fork in the last few years, including the Menhaden, a 16-room boutique hotel that opened in 2018, and the Hotel Moraine, where the former owners of the Menhaden renovated the Sunset Motel into 20 rooms with views of Long Island Sound.

‘It will never happen’

But a yearlong moratorium on new hotel projects approved by the town of Southold in June could change the gentrification momentum. 

Two major hotel projects, including the Cardinale family’s proposed 121-room hotel in Mattituck and Stacey Soloviev’s 40-room resort at her Peconic Bay Vineyards in Cutchogue, are indefinitely paused. (The town is doing a full zoning update during the moratorium.)

Locals had voiced concerns about traffic and late-night partying at new hotels, as well as with the increasing cost of housing, a Hamptons-esque worry. But others believe that without high-end tourism and hospitality, officials won’t be able to preserve the region as a wine and agricultural area and might instead incentivize suburban-style housing.

Southold also enacted so-called big house laws last year, when the town board voted to reduce maximum house square footages, dependent on lot sizes, in a direct attempt to curb “Hamptonization.”

Development on the North Fork is further limited by how much vacant land has development rights. Stefan Soloviev, currently the area’s largest landowner, has assured locals he has no interest in covering farmland with tract homes. Soloviev, a Hamptons exile, has said he left the South Fork when it stopped being peaceful.

Locals are also skeptical that that the signs of extravagances will ruin the region. The North Fork will always be different from its neighbor to the south, locals say, and the region can absorb some change.

“It will never happen,” Elliman’s Bennett said of becoming the Hamptons. “There will always be a price and culture gap between the North and South Forks.”

“I am seeing billionaires who could easily buy in the Hamptons,” Naddell said. “They are just over it.”