"We'd ride everywhere-to Nick & Toni's, to the Clam Bar on Montauk Highway, to the ferry to Shelter Island."Īnd as her daughter had predicted, she was very social. "I'd get up in the morning and garden, go to the beach or take a swim, drive to Southampton for lunch, come back, and then go to Amagansett or Montauk for dinner." Her favorite way to get around: a bicycle. Martha loved everything about the coastal haven dotted with potato farms and cornfields. To furnish it, she shopped at yard sales and antiques stores, gradually filling the space with collections of mercury glass, McCoy pottery, and jadeite dishes. "It's an old-fashioned house, but it has a clean, pristine vibe," she says. Working with renowned local contractor Ben Krupinski, she enclosed a covered porch off the kitchen to create a dining area wainscoted many of the ceilings and knocked down walls to create a larger living room and luxe primary suite. Her renovation hewed as closely to the original as possible, but Martha's practical, polished aesthetic made it fresh. ![]() "It was the oldest house on the block and a total wreck," she said. "And then Alexis said, 'You have to buy a house.'" So Martha called a broker and looked at a slew of places, including a dignified but woebegone 1870s shingled cottage, one block from the ocean on tree-lined Lily Pond Lane, known as one of East Hampton's most gracious streets. "I brought in all this cute furniture and gave dinner parties and met people that way-it was so much fun," she says. Within a year, Martha had rented a small cottage of her own on a quiet lane near the East Hampton Library. "She said, 'Mom, it's the place to come for a social life,'" recalls Martha, who dipped her toe in as a regular guest at the Sagaponack home of her friends writer Kurt Vonnegut and his wife, photographer Jill Krementz. More than 30 years ago, Martha's daughter, Alexis, encouraged her mother, newly single after 29 years of marriage, to spend weekends in the Hamptons, the string of venerable beach towns on the eastern end of Long Island.
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