17 Island Road

Hampton Waters was founded in 1964 by Barney Rosset, the owner of Grove Press from 1951 to 1985 and the man who put the uncensored Lady Chatterley's Lover into American mail in 1959, then carried Tropic of Cancer through the obscenity trials that ended at the Supreme Court in 1964. Naked Lunch followed. So did Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Genet, Malcolm X, Marguerite Duras and Octavio Paz. He drew a community of streets on the shore of Three Mile Harbor and it still carries his name on a rock: a memorial plaque set on the green at the end of Island Road, the same road this house sits on.

The association owns the green and the bulkhead beyond it, where members tie up small boats, and a path from the far corner leads to a community beach and a narrow peninsula with an osprey nest on it. The broker's phrase for all of this is a community day dock. The longer version is that the amenity and the address were designed together, sixty years ago, by someone who was not thinking about resale.

The house arrived six years after the community did, in 1970, and it reads that way: a brick forecourt at the entry, exposed beams overhead, a wood-burning brick fireplace anchoring the living room. Roughly 2,300 square feet across two floors, four bedrooms and three full baths, with a two-car attached garage. The first floor holds two guest bedrooms, a bath, the living room and a kitchen with a dining area beside it.

The second floor is where the siting pays. The primary suite opens to a deck facing the water, with a steam shower off the bath, and the remaining guest bedroom is glazed floor to ceiling toward the harbor. Decks run along the water side of the house, and a path drops through the grade to a wide sandy beach. There is no pool, and no room made for one. The land does the work instead.

Three Mile Harbor takes its name from its distance to East Hampton village. It runs to more than a thousand acres, opens north into Gardiner's Bay through a narrow dredged channel, and is managed on the public's behalf by the Trustees of the Freeholders and Commonalty of the Town of East Hampton, an office created by the Dongan Patent of December 9, 1686. The bottomlands, the beaches and the intertidal edge fall under that authority, which predates the state and the country both.

This parcel sits on 1.4 acres above that edge, with about 110 feet of frontage and a bulkheaded shoreline for direct boating access. A freshwater pond sits alongside, which is what gives the property water on more than one exposure and the listing its claim of sunrise and sunset from the same address.

The property last changed hands on July 1, 2024, after a listing cycle that began in January 2022 and moved down in four steps before it closed. It returned to the market on July 23, 2026. Taxes are published at $4,814 a year, which is low for a waterfront parcel of this size and worth confirming with the town before you count on it.

What is being bought is a modest house on an immodest piece of ground: a cul-de-sac lot in a community laid out for artists and writers, two miles from Maidstone Park, three from the East Hampton train, and a hundred and ten feet of private beach on a harbor that has never quite stopped being a working one.