amagansett

Like a lot of artists, literary figures and actors in the 1950s, including Edward Albee, Jackson Pollock and Truman Capote, newlyweds Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller headed to the Hamptons in the summer of 1957.

The couple reportedly shacked up in a humble cottage at the historic Stony Hill Farm in Amagansett, part of which is nowadays owned by Alec and Hilaria Baldwin. However, so the story goes, to thwart the press, the frequently paparazzi-tracked pair would also stay at another place on nearby Quail Hill, in an old windmill that was invisible from the road and that had been converted into a unique and simply appointed residence. It was only five years later that Monroe died in her home in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles that was recently purchased by a neighbor who initially wanted to tear the house down.

Monroe and Miller’s funky, romantic hideaway in the Hamptons, not quite two miles inland from popular Atlantic Avenue Beach and appropriately known as The Windmill House, has recently popped up for sale for $12 million. The almost 5.5-acre, mostly wooded property offers total privacy thanks to it being bordered on two sides by protected land owned by the Peconic Land Trust.

The 19th-century windmill was expanded and converted into a rustic residence in the 1950s.

The windmill sits on the high point of Quail Hill and was built in the mid-1800s. It pumped water for the farm on which it sat for about 100 years, but sometime around 1950, Samuel Rubin, the founder of Fabergé Perfumes, converted the three-story windmill into a rustic guest house. It was around this time that a structure was added to the back of the windmill to house a kitchen, along with a bedroom and a bathroom. 

The property was acquired in 1967 by Deborah Ann Light, a philanthropic heiress to the Upjohn pharmaceutical fortune (and a Wiccan priestess!), who donated the adjacent 20 acres to the Peconic Land Trust, a Southampton-based land preservation nonprofit organization for which she was a founding member. Tax records indicate the seller has owned the property for at least a dozen years.

The kitchen has all that is necessary for whipping up simple summer meals.

Today, the approximately 1,300-square-foot home remains an unpretentious getaway in one of the most exclusive and expensive resort enclaves in the United States. It has a cozy sitting room, a pint-sized kitchen with a tiny built-in table for two, a couple of bedrooms, one of them an octagonal space on the second floor, and a single bathroom. The unfinished third floor, a one-of-a-kind walk-in closet or storage space, still has the windmill’s mechanical equipment; a metal brake holds the blades of the windmill in place.

Just outside the windmill’s front door is a large brick patio for enjoying sea breezes, and elsewhere there’s a detached two-car garage and a small accessory building that has previously been used as an art studio.

The original mechanical equipment remains in place; a metal brake keeps the windmill from turning.

Besides Monroe and Miller, The Windmill House has been a temporary refuge for several decorators and designers over the years, along with English actor Terence Stamp (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) and satirical novelist Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five).

Listing agent Bobby Rosenbaum of Douglas Elliman has also stayed at The Windmill House over the years and told Robb Report, “You can really sense the awesome power of Mother Nature in the beauty that surrounds this special home, from the aroma of fresh, clean, salty air blowing gently over Quail Hill, to the musical sounds of the gusts of wind that kiss the trees and rustle their branches.”

Still, this is the Hamptons, the summertime playground of the world’s richest and most famous. And so, the value of this property may not be so much in its literary and show business provenance but rather its potential to build, according to marketing material, a residence of up to 20,000 square feet with distant views of the Atlantic Ocean and the Montauk/Napeague Bay. 

Click here for more photos of The Windmill House. More