A Room At The Beach

A Room At The Beach

Two blocks from Bridgehampton's Main Street, at 2668 Montauk Highway, a roadside motel that had been overlooked since the 1960s reopened in July 2018 as a ten-room hotel, restored by Lucy Swift Weber and Charles Lemonides, a couple with backgrounds in design and travel and, as locals in the area would say, deep roots in the Hamptons. The property sits on a acre and a half, a scale that matters here, since most of it went not into rooms but into grounds, an alley of towering redwoods leading back from the road, and a garden that the owners treat as the actual centre of the hotel rather than a courtyard between buildings. Ten rooms is the whole operation, no annex, no expansion planned, and that number shapes everything that follows. Inside, the rooms run to Frette linens and robes, rainfall showerheads, Nespresso machines, and minibars stocked from L&W Market, the upscale grocer up the road that shares ownership with the hotel. Furnishings are largely custom-made rather than sourced from a catalogue, and several suites, including the one the hotel calls the Prestige Coast Suite, have heated floors and deep soaking tubs, details more associated with a full-service resort than a motel-turned-boutique. Each room opens onto its own seating area set behind a planted screen, private enough that neighbouring guests rarely see each other, an arrangement that does more for the sense of seclusion than any interior choice could. What it feels like is a version of staying at a well-run friend's house rather than a hotel, in the specific sense that the owners lend guests a beach parking pass, chairs, and an umbrella on arrival, the kind of local logistics that usually cost visitors a morning to sort out themselves. The pool and garden pull harder than expected, and more than one guest ends up staying closer to the property than they planned, given how easy it is to spend the day within the acre and a half rather than driving to the beach at all. This suits people who want the Hamptons without needing to be seen having it, who would rather sit under redwoods with a coffee than parade past them. You should not come if you want scale, a spa menu, or the anonymity of a larger property, ten rooms means the pool and garden are shared with everyone else staying that week, and there is no getting lost in the crowd. You should come for the opposite of that, a small, specific, well-run place where the owners' own habits (the market next door, the beach chairs by the door) have shaped the whole stay before you've unpacked. The short version: A ten-room former motel in Bridgehampton, restored by its owners since 2018, with an acre and a half of garden, redwoods, and a pool at the centre of a stay built around ease rather than scale.