Look Into Richard Bender’s Amazing Glass Cottage in Amagansett

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In 1960, a young architect named Richard Bender began to build a semiutopian community on a 20-acre property near the far end of Long Island, in a town popular with New York’s top artists and writers of the day.

The project in Amagansett, NY, which he called Amenity, featured a small handful of Mid-Century Modern summer cottages built around a communal tennis court. At the time, each cottage cost less than $15,000 to build, furnish, and landscape. The community’s first home—the 850-square-foot cottage Bender and his family lived in for decades—is now listed for $2.2 million.

Bender’s home is striking for how much larger it feels. Large glass walls run the length of both sides of the flat-roofed home, allowing anyone to look through the house to the woods beyond.

Exterior

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Living room and kitchen

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The home’s second owner, photographer Anita Calero, bought the cottage in 1994 and restored it to its original condition—swapping out the original glass with insulated glass, updating the linoleum floors with aged pine, and putting in custom oak cabinetry that matched Bender’s original 1960s-era color palette.

In 1960, Bender and his wife, Sue, were living in Greenwich Village with their two young boys, and had spent the previous two summers renting a cottage on Long Island with their friends.

“And that got us thinking about how you could live a life where … a small New York apartment could be bigger, in a different way, than having a bigger apartment,” Bender recalls. “We’d have a small apartment with almost no windows, and then we would go out in the country and have something else.”

Living room

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Bedroom

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They found their “something else” on 20 acres of woodland in Amagansett, a small hamlet near the town of East Hampton. The Benders bought the land for $20,000 in the middle of the winter and began building their home that spring. The first cottage had no central heating or air conditioning. On cold nights, they’d light a fire in their floating orb fireplace.

The family spent the next few years building inexpensive cottages along Red Dirt Road, which were bought by like-minded friends from the city.

“It became a life. It was marvelous,” Bender later recalled. “In the winter we didn’t go out [to the cottage]. In the spring and the fall we were out for three days, usually in the city for four. In the summer—we basically stayed out all summer. … We did that for 10 years, and the kids grew up there, in a wonderful world.”

The early community shared everything—one family owned a Land Rover, another had a sailboat, and neighbors would share tools, equipment, and baby-sitting. Bender recalls the families would often barbecue together on the beach.

“I don’t think we ate a meal indoors for years,” he says. “It was a whole evolution of houses built with the idea of simple spaces, openness, bringing the woods into your house, and living with nature.”

In the 1960s, similar communities of Mid-Century Modern homes began appearing in other towns. In California, Joseph Eichler built modern residential developments, often anchored by central community features. Like Amenity, most of Eichler’s homes have been carefully restored and now command top prices.

Today, just one other home from the original Amenity project still stands. That cottage was expanded and renovated, and last sold in 2011 for $2.2 million, according to agent Bayard S. Fenwick.

Freshwater pool

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At 850 square feet, Fender’s home is spare and minimalist, with high-end, period-appropriate finishes. In addition to the glass walls and sliding glass doors, there are dark, exposed wooden beams throughout. The galley-style kitchen has been updated with a Sub-Zero refrigerator, Viking gas stove, and Bosch dishwasher.

The two bedrooms each have their own floor-to-ceiling windows. Outside, dual patios run nearly the length of the house, with a large mahogany deck in the front, and a smaller deck in the back, built around a Japanese-inspired rock garden.

The most recent owner, who purchased the home from Calero in 2011 for $1.6 million, added the freshwater pool and sauna.

Bender went on to work with some of the most important artists, architects, and designers of his day, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Mark Rothko, Norman Mailer, and others. He taught architecture at Columbia, Harvard, MIT, and University of California at Berkeley, later becoming chairman of Berkeley’s architecture department.

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