East Hampton Bans Megamansions

Megamansion projects in East Hampton will soon be a thing of the past.

The town board unanimously voted to amend the local zoning and building construction codes last week, 27East reported. The changes were designed to close loopholes that allowed residential construction to bypass parts of the zoning code and the town’s comprehensive plan.

The most notable — and controversial — update was to halve the maximum allowable gross floor area of a new house. The cap will be cut to 10,000 square feet, drawing disappointment from builders and even select members of the board, although they ultimately ushered the changes through rather than reject the entire package.

A 20,000-square-foot home is larger than the town allows a big-box store to be. Oversize homes that already exist will be grandfathered, leaving their owners with a commodity that can no longer be built in East Hampton.

The board declined to add basements to the calculation of gross floor area, but did cap the size of basements relative to exterior walls and other features of a home.

It also changed the definition of a basement to an area that is partly or completely below natural or adjacent exterior grade, trying to close a loophole that builders used to add one story.

Other changes involved controlling massing and lot coverage, such as folding accessory structures’ open-air appendages into gross floor area calculations.

“We’ve just closed the loopholes in the zoning code,” Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez said after the vote, 27East reported.

The zoning changes emerged from the efforts of a working group formed almost two years ago to evaluate potential updates to the code.

East Hampton is following in the footsteps of Southold Town on the North Fork, which two years ago banned the construction of sprawling homes, except those built on expansive lots.

— Holden Walter-Warner