Rowdy Hall

Some houses ask to be rebuilt. This one asked to be held up. Dating to the mid-eighteenth century, the house has moved once before in its history and carried names tied to East Hampton's earliest families before it became known, in a later chapter, as summer bachelor lodgings—Rowdy Hall. By the time we arrived, its foundation was failing and its floors had settled as much as six inches out of level. We raised the entire structure fourteen feet on steel beams and hydraulic jacks, excavating by hand beneath a crawl space barely thirty inches high to set new supports under the house and its original fireplace. Working with architect Erica Broberg, engineer Dilandro Andrews, and Guy Davis House Movers, we returned the framing to level without disturbing what didn't need disturbing: the original doors and hardware, the original floor system, now simply supported from beneath instead of failing beneath itself. A new structural beam in the living room disappears inside a hollow timber casing built to match the house around it. The original windows were restored, not replaced, pane by pane. And where the stabilization work damaged decorative plasterwork, decorative painter Brian Lever recreated the historic stencil patterns by hand, matching a 2007 paint schedule so precisely that the repair reads as if nothing had ever moved at all.