Fun Friday – Windmill Houses of Long Island NY

We need some entertainment after seeing tons of dropped ceilings and peeling laminate floors, so Old Houses Under Under $50k introduced Fun Friday a while back. It is a collection of weird structures, usually NOT for sale, simply of interest.  Today we feature Windmill Houses of Long Island, New York.

 

 

Some like it hot, some like it windmill style. You can rent this windmill house in Amagansett, NY for $55K for a few months. You would be in good company with past renters including Marilyn Monroe and her playwright husband, Arthur Miller.  Monroe  prepped for her role in the 1959 movie “Some Like it Hot” at the windmill and was regularly seen driving around town in her Thunderbird convertible.

Designer Ralph Lauren,  actor Terence Stamp, and author Kurt Vonnegut also stayed here. Vonnegut often challenged his then teenage neighbor, Geraldo Rivera, to tennis matches.

Built in the 1800s as a windmill, the structure was converted into a home in the 1950s by the founder of Fabergé perfume, Samuel Rubin.

Original cost of the windmill was in the four figures, but the residence with its five acres was on the market recently for $11.5M.

 

 

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162 Fairview Ave, Montauk, NY

 

 

Montauk’s only Windmill House was built in 1928 as a house by architect Arthur W. B. Wood. He actually built the  2,600 square feet as his own dream house. It has six bedrooms and four baths on a quarter of an acre.

 

 

Wood lived in the home for many years before he sold it in 1965 to Mary Gosman, matriarch of Montauk’s Gosman family. It was sold at least two more times after that.  In 2018, it was on the market for $1.9M.

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Robert Downey Jr.’s Windmill House, East Hampton, NY

Robert Downey Jr. and his wife Susan purchased the East Hampton windmill house in 2015 for $10.5

The house is known as the DeRose Windmill.  Built by Edward DeRose in 1885, the structure is actually a “faux” windmill never meant to mill grain, pump water, or convert wind into energy. Instead, it was built as an accurate replica of a different and authentic East Hampton windmill.

 

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