There’s a boldfaced brouhaha bubbling up this summer — has New York’s quietly elegant, ever-trendier Hudson Valley finally knocked the cash-splashing, high-falutin’ Hamptons off its perch as the preferred hideout for NYC’s elite?
Nick Ewing thinks so. The 46-year-old commodities exec thought he’d found his forever escape after snapping up an East Hampton pad in 2013 — until the pandemic-era hordes swooped in.
“I love the beach, to get away from the madness of the city. I thought we would live out there, in some form, until we died,” he told The Post.
“Then, during COVID, ten million people moved out to East Hampton. And they never left,” he said, describing how the Memorial Day-to-Labor Day retreat became a full-time residence for many, including boldfacers like Jerry Seinfeld and Howard Stern — who has famously been broadcasting from his Southampton home since 2020.
Ewing watched helplessly as the traffic jams and overcrowded restaurants of summer became the all-season norm.
“You can survive that for sixteen weekends, but now it’s all year ‘round,” he said, explaining that to make matters worse, the vibe of the new arrivals seemed all wrong.
“We had an influencer move in with the lady next door to us, who was basically having Kardashian-esque parties every weekend,” says Ewing, “That’s not the scene I went out there for.” (Michael Rubin’s over-the-top July 4th White Party at his $50m Watermill estate is one such culprit — Kim, Khloe and Kendall Jenner have all been clocked.)
With regret, Ewing sold his place in late 2021, with no plans to buy anywhere else — until his curiosity was piqued by a property for sale in the Hudson Valley.
“It ticked every box,” he said of the home in Dutchess County he and his husband ended up buying — just a few weeks later.
“The only thing we miss about the Hamptons is the beach, but I don’t even really think about it. There is just so much more to love about being up here,” he raved.
Ewing isn’t the only wealthy New Yorker opting to go north instead of east these days.
When members club Soho House eyed New York for the second outpost of its winning Farmhouse resort/retreat concept, which originated in the UK (and where Meghan Markle held her bachelorette party, no less), the global brand didn’t pick the Hamptons — but rather a vacant estate just outside of the tony upstate town of Rhinebeck.
Down the road in Hyde Park, near the Culinary Institute of America, uber-luxe hotel brand One & Only will also make its debut in the next two years, even selling residences on site. And rumor has it that Estelle Manor, another British members’ club, will materialize in the same area at some point.
All these new developments are taking shape alongside a growing selection of cities, towns and villages that have become hot properties, from Rhinebeck (long jokingly described by some locals as “the missing Hampton”) to unbelievably hip Hudson, plus the many wineries, organic farm stands and a rich performing arts scene that are making Hamptons refugees — not to mention a ton of New Yorkers who’d never have chosen the Jitney life — stop thinking about life on the East End at all: they’re too busy loving the Hudson Valley.
Of course, the Hamptons remains a shorthand for spendy summers — a retreat with everything from designer stores to a dog-friendly beach or two, the ultimate, time-honored choice for those looking to escape New York.
The elegant area is ever-evolving, too, with new arrivals like East Hampton’s reimagined Hedges Inn this summer, which socialite Sarah Wetenhall has transformed after its controversial — and temporary — attempted stint as a beachy branch of NYC A-lister magnet Zero Bond, faved by everyone from Tom Brady to Taylor Swift.
And out in ever-pricier Montauk, LDV’s Barlume Beach is another newcomer, amping up the town’s fashpack cred. (The biggest name spotted so far: RHONY exile Ramona Singer, who came to the opening.) The polo tournament situation chukkas on, not to mention the countless galas held in fashionable estate backyards during the warmer months.
But is the region’s heavily gilded crown about to be snatched by that understated Upstate upstart?
Hampton loyalist Carson Griffith is unconvinced. The veteran social chronicler who just started Rich People Shit, a newsletter focusing on the 0.1%, says it’s not even a contest.
“I go to the Hamptons all the time, and it still wins: on scale, institutional prestige, the history, the ocean,” she told The Post.
Look at Babe’s, the brand new, Meg Ryan-luring diner in Sag Harbor, she said, for evidence of the hotspot-making power of the South Fork.
“Even the parking lot turned into a social scene — people are obsessed with it.”
Members’ clubs like Soho House haven’t turned up in the Hamptons, Griffith insists, because the scene there is already self-sorting.
“It already has an existing social infrastructure. Upstate still feels like a landgrab,” the insider snarked.
And speaking of landgrabs, there’s the East End property market — which crypto money has made more buoyant than ever, according to Douglas Elliman’s Enzo Morabito, a longtime realtor in the region.
This summer, the well-known doyen of waterfront manses told The Post, he’s anticipating more transactions than even at the peak of the pandemic.
“The towns here become more like Fifth Avenue in the summer, and the #1 place to be has to be East Hampton village,” he said. For bargains, especially south of the highway, you’re looking farther — and farther — afield. For example, $3 million will get you a nice place all the way over in Westhampton Beach — but only if you hurry.
“Even that is going through the roof. It’s going to disappear within the next two or three years,” Morabito warned.
Hamptons Chronicles writer Rory Satran, an East End fixture for more than 15 years, is another local watcher who sees the momentum continuing to build.
“In the summer, the Hamptons gets extremely social with endless galas and parties,” unlike in the Hudson Valley, she told The Post — and even more so lately, with the ratings-topping Bravo reality show “Summer House” serving as an aspirational commercial for the area.
“It’s brought more people to the clubs in Southampton, with a new generation discovering that,” she said. Even over the rainy Memorial Day weekend this year, with weather that could normally keep the moneyed crowd at home, Satran reported that the designer boutiques of East Hampton were packed with eager, youthful shoppers.
Alejandro Saralegui, the longtime director of Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack, insists there’s no comparing his chosen home with the northern wilds.
“There’s nowhere else within the proximity of any major metropolis that has beaches like the Hamptons. If you’re not a beach person, that’s fine,” he said. “But who isn’t a beach person?”
Certainly, no one’s heading to the Hudson Valley to sun themselves on a rustic riverbank — but locals offer feisty fightbacks to defend the honor of upscale Upstate.
“The Hamptons is for people escaping Manhattan. [The Hudson Valley] is for people escaping the people escaping Manhattan,” posits Emily Sachar, editor of the Daily Catch, a Dutchess Co.-based news site.
She said that Valley history is more storied than the Hamptons — where most of the homes worth ogling were built a matter of decades ago. Places like Kingston were Revolutionary War flashpoints; today, the city streets and back roads of the region still boast an array of real estate dating back to the 1700s or earlier.
“We’ve got enough architectural history in our pinky finger to make the Hamptons look like a very expensive pop-up installation,” Sachar sniffed.
Peter Ilani sells many of those properties — he’s a Berkshire Hathaway broker who moved up from Long Island two decades ago, spying the untapped potential.
When he meets buyers wobbling between upstate and out East, he’s unfazed. “I talk to them: Do you like sitting in traffic for 3-4 hours? If you do, let’s go for the Hamptons.”
Upstate, he says, is appealing for more than the fact you’re unlikely to ever sit idling on the Taconic Parkway, the favored city-to-country escape route of the Valley’s east bank crowd.
“The range of different homes is tremendous, and you don’t have many subdivisions where the houses sit next to each other. The Hamptons came much later. And I talk to them about sea levels, too. You want to be in the water, or for the next hurricane to level your house? I don’t see any pluses anymore,” he said.
It doesn’t hurt, of course, that even after COVID sent house prices through the roof north of NYC, you can still score a major estate for peanuts compared to the East End.
Out by the ocean, it’s big houses on small plots — Upstate, it’s smaller homes on big parcels of land, with acreage sometimes in the six figures.
Brendan Saunders is a 40-year-old tech exec based in the Big Apple — he mulled buying out East five years ago after spending a few memorable summers there.
He hesitated in part because of the pricing — homes that had sold for, say, around a million bucks in 2019, were now going for three times that in the pandemic’s wake.
He’d once loved the social scene in the Hamptons, centered mostly on friendly neighbors taking turns to throw parties. There was a palpable shift as long-time folks sold up to make the most of those price jumps.
“There were fewer and fewer people who were around all the weekends,” he says, of buyers who were now in many cases just adding a Hamptons home – because everyone else was – to their NYC-Palm Beach-Aspen portfolio.
“The community started sagging a bit, with a lot more finance folks there for one weekend in 10. The housekeeper was there more often than the owners,” he said.
Initially, one appeal of the Hudson Valley was the distance. Two hours north of the city, and you’re deep into the countryside, Saunders realized. Not so when headed to The Hamptons.
”Two hours east, you’re still in the quagmire of the LIE,” he laughed.
Then he started looking for homes in the Hudson Valley instead, and was flabbergasted — a good condition, five-bedroom home near Amenia, on an acre and a half of land, would cost him just $500,000. He bought it.
“You couldn’t get anything in East Hampton for even double that. It’s quick and easy to go and do things that feel real — East Hampton is lovely, but even the green space is very curated, and so are the people. And the sense of community here is so strong; everyone just kind of gets along,” he said.
Saunders is right about the social scene — less frenzied and paparazzi-stalking than out East, but it’s definitely there, especially in the most fashionable towns of Dutchess and Columbia counties.
In the end, the two spots may have more in common than they think — and not just because Bravo’s been spotted filming Upstate recently. (The Jersey “Housewives” were seen in the pricier-than-ever former hippie haunt of Woodstock, last month.)
Hamptons refugee Nick Ewing points out how the farms which once dominated the East End were turned over to development or catering more directly to the new crowd.
“The same up here: it’s a very agricultural landscape, and the farmers that have survived have pivoted. Very few people do dairy now — [more] grains and corn for the distilling scene,” he explained.
The seemingly disparate regions have even more in common, too, Hamptons Chronicle author Rory Satran explains. There’s a problem dogging both of them — solve it and you’ll trounce the other.
“We both have cutesy grocery stores and fancy pies, but whichever area manages to eradicate the tick population? They will probably win.”
How do the two areas compare?
The Post compiled a distinctly subjective smackdown – make up your mind who should be declared the winner.
STAR POWER
HAMPTONS Take your pick: you can’t throw a lobster roll without hitting someone headline-grabbing, from Kelly Ripa and Billy Joel to Sarah Jessica Parker.
HUDSON VALLEY Jeffrey Dean Morgan and wife Hilarie Burton are fixtures in Rhinebeck, while Al Roker splits his time between UES and the upper Hudson Valley; Savannah Guthrie also has a country pad nearby.
SPLASHIEST MANSION
HAMPTONS The priciest publicly listed property is the $125m estate at Tony Cooks Lane in Water Mill, an 8-bedroom, 20,000 sq ft equestrian compound ranging over 80 acres. It’s still cheaper than the priciest sale so far: the $137m deal in 2014 on East Hampton’s most desirable drag, Further Lane.
HUDSON VALLEY Got a spare $90m? You could splash out on the 2,150 acres of Mill Farm, a passion project for financier Daniel Slott in Ancramdale. Yep, it’s another horse farm, and on the market for four times more than any yet recorded sale in the region – the last top price was $18.5m for an estate in Rhinebeck four years ago.
PROPERTY PRICES
HAMPTONS Data guru Jonathan Miller says the median price in Suffolk County is $680,000 – or around 51.1% higher than in 2020, pre-pandemic.
HUDSON VALLEY Dutchess Co’s median is just $489,500 but Columbia pips them all at $810,000 – hikes of 48.3% and 54.3% respectively over the same period.
BRAVOLEBRITY QUOTIENT
HAMPTONS It’s a fixture of shows like RHONY, and one of the buzziest TV shows of the moment is “Summer House” (Yes, we’re all team Ciara)
HUDSON VALLEY “RHONY” OG Luann de Lesseps loved her Kingston-adjacent home — until she didn’t, selling it in 2020. Lately, the RHONJ ladies have been spotted in Woodstock.
TICK RISK
HAMPTONS Between 2019 and 2022, Suffolk County had the highest number of Lyme cases of any county, anywhere in the country.
HUDSON VALLEY Dutchess County took that crown twenty years earlier, topping the tables, though its incidences have tapered off.
