12 Surrey Court

Suffolk County knows this address as parcel 184.-5-16 in the Town of East Hampton: 0.84 of an acre, tax class 210, a one family year round residence. The year on the record is 1984, and the style the listing gives it is Contemporary, which on the East End in the middle eighties meant a particular set of moves. A low block set close to the drive. A shed roof over the living end. A band of clerestory glass carried above the entry, so that daylight arrives over your head rather than through the front wall. All three survive, under white horizontal siding and a standing seam metal roof, with black framed windows and a black door at the top of a mahogany stair.

The street carries a name the tax roll does not use. The MLS files Surrey Court under Hansom Hills Section One, and the lots it files alongside this one run from 0.73 to 1.04 of an acre. Number 12 sits in the middle of that range, which is why the hedges along the court read as one continuous line rather than a sequence of decisions.

Above it sits the wider designation. East Hampton North is the census name for the ground that begins where the village stops, 5.57 square miles of it, with 5,377 people counted there in 2020. It is the part of East Hampton that is lived in through February, which is the claim the listing opens with and the record supports.

Three bedrooms and three full baths on the main level, the primary among them, with sliding glass doors straight out to the yard. The living room runs to a cathedral ceiling. A gas fireplace sits in white painted brick with a brass trimmed firebox, built ins take the wall opposite, and sliding glass doors open on two sides of the room. The plan runs open from there through the dining area to the kitchen, where navy lower cabinets sit under white uppers with glass fronts, the backsplash is stacked white tile, and a stainless gas range stands under a stainless hood beside a stone topped center island. Hardwood floors throughout. Oil heat and central air behind the walls, and the laundry in the hall where you pass it.

The lower level is finished end to end and reads as a second house rather than a basement. One long open room for recreation and media, a dry bar with a full height wine refrigerator, a full bath with a dark vanity and a marble floor, and a separate bonus room that takes an office, a guest, or the overflow. Light plank flooring, recessed lighting, and enough width for a table tennis table without anyone moving the sofa.

The back of the property is the argument. A heated Gunite pool with an automatic cover, edged in bluestone that widens into a dining terrace under an automatic awning, and a separate seating area built around a gas fire pit. A mahogany outdoor shower and mahogany fencing. Irrigation and mature planting, clipped low along the coping and left tall at the boundary. A storage shed at the far corner with a vertical wood door, already close enough to a poolside cabana that the listing says so out loud.

The record gives a year, a class and an acreage, and then stops. What it cannot carry is what the photographs do: at dusk, with the fire pit lit, the roofline that 1984 drew is the thing framing the water.