Alec Baldwin Tears Down to Remodel

Much of the Nathaniel Baker House on Town Lane in Amagansett, which is owned by the actor Alec Baldwin, has been torn down as part of a substantial renovation.

The house, at Stony Hill Farm, dates to the early-18th century. It originally stood on the north side of Main Street, just east of what is now Gansett Green Manor, according to Robert Hefner, a historic preservation consultant and neighbor. In the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller spent a summer in an accessory structure on the property.

Originally a saltbox design, the house was made into a full two-story house in the 1790s by Samuel Schellinger, a carpenter and millwright who built its Federal period stairway, Mr. Hefner said in an email.

Harry and Mary Hamlin purchased the house in 1913 and moved it to Town Lane. Joseph Greenleaf Thorp, the architect who designed the Grey Gardens estate in East Hampton that was later made famous by Jacqueline Kennedy's cousins, Edith Bouvier Beale and Edith Bouvier Beale, known as Big and Little Edie, remodeled the structure into a country house that was the centerpiece of the Hamlins' farm.

Mrs. Hamlin was a collector of early East Hampton houses, Mr. Hefner said. She moved Rowdy Hall and Gansett House to the green on Egypt Lane, and owned and operated the Hedges Inn. She was also an important figure in the preservation of Mulford Farm and Home, Sweet Home. She sold Stony Hill Farm to Jeffrey Potter in 1949.

Mr. Baldwin and his then-wife, the actress Kim Basinger, bought and enlarged the Nathaniel Baker House in 1996. The late Mr. Potter's son, Job Potter, whose family owns a parcel adjacent to Mr. Baldwin's, would not comment on the present state of the Nathaniel Baker House.

According to some reports, Mr. Baldwin put the property up for sale last year and purchased a house in East Hampton. That was not the case, according to an Amagansett real estate broker who is familiar with the properties in question, but asked not to be named. In fact, he said, Mr. Baldwin had bought a house on Fresh Pond Road in Amagansett, but soon put it on the market again.

"He loves that house too much" to sell it," the broker said of Mr. Baldwin and the Nathaniel Baker House. "I know that for a fact. The fact that he has been doing renovations, which he'd been planning for quite some time, is indicative of that. He is improving it to continue to enjoy it."