Turning a Big House All the Way Around

By Carissa Katz

When money is no object, most buyers faced with a poorly situated house on a great piece of property would be likely to tear the house down and start from scratch. That wasn't the case with a residence on Georgica Pond built in 1900 for the painter Edward Simmons.

"Several people that looked at it fell in love with the site, but felt the house was hopelessly dated," said Frank Newbold, a Sotheby's broker who handled the sale of the house, which is on Briarpatch Road in East Hampton.

Among its best features was a three-story-high room with windows covering its north wall. It was once a studio for Mr. Simmons, a muralist whose work was commissioned by the Library of Congress, the Boston Statehouse, and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The architect Stanford White, Mr. Simmons's best friend, was said to have helped sketch the plans for the house, Mr. Newbold said.

The expanse of windows, which provided perfect light for painting, would have afforded a great view of the pond, but for one thing: the pond was to the west, not the north.

To Jeffrey Colle of Wainscott, a contractor who owns J.C. Construction Management, this was a minor obstacle. As soon as he saw the place, he said, "I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I would pick up the north elevation and turn it so that it could face the pond."

In April, he and several investors bought the house and he began to put his plan into action. A crew dug out the perimeter of the house. "You want to expose all four sides so you know what you're dealing with," Mr. Colle said. "Then you can examine how the house is being held up." This one was supported by locust posts.

Other workers dug under the foundation and began to install cribbing to support the 160-ton house. Six-by-six-inch posts laid crosswise in layers recreated the original support system. More earth was removed to give workers from Dawn House Movers of Yaphank enough space to move comfortably underneath while they installed more cribbing and steel I-beams. The entire house was lifted by hydraulic jacks positioned under the steel beams. "You have to lift it evenly or you will crack the plaster," Mr. Colle said.

This is not the first residence Mr. Colle has repositioned with Dawn House Movers. In the early 1990s, he cut a house on Egypt Lane into four pieces and had them carried to Route 114 in East Hampton, where the house was reassembled.

He moved another house from Wainscott Main Street, past the Wainscott School, to Wainscott Hollow Road. "All the schoolkids came out and watched it," he said. Other projects have involved lifting massive structures and then setting them back down again. He did this in the 1980s at Maidstone Hall, a house on Ocean Road in East Hampton. "We picked up 12,000 feet of it, redid the foundation, and dropped it back down."

Mr. Colle specializes in high-end restorations and designs and builds what he calls "custom houses for sale." His father and grandfather were both carpenters and he followed them into the business at a young age. He prides himself on attention to detail. That, he said, sets him apart from "spec" house builders. Among his higher-profile jobs was the renovation of Alec Baldwin's house on Town Lane in Amagansett several years ago. He is now working on three houses in Sagaponack as well as the former Simmons residence.

That house is a challenge, he said, like a puzzle. "If you take enough things apart, you learn how they fit back together."

All the preparations having been completed, the house was rotated 90 degrees last week. The mechanics of moving it were "remarkably low tech," Mr. Newbold said last week, as he watched Stanley and Lenny Kazel rub bars of Ivory soap on the steel I-beams. "You put Ivory soap on the beams and pull." The soap eased the house's progress as it was pulled across the beams.

By last Thursday, the wall of windows provided a glorious view of the pond. Mr. Colle will next install a basement and get to work on interior and exterior renovations. He expects to be done by the fall of 2006 but will probably have put the house back on the market before then.

The finished house will have two new wings. "You will walk into a two-story foyer and right into a big room and right into the view," Mr. Colle said.