On the Spring Cover

A Canal of One’s Own Canoe Place Inn & Cottages and its sibling, Canoe Place Boathouses, share the Shinnecock Canal and a lot more.

Hotel-fanciers generally fall into one of two categories. Some would be happy living in a hotel suite for the rest of their lives. Others dream of owning a house that looks just like a hotel. Needless to say, neither option is terribly practical. In the first case, unless you’re a committed minimalist, there’s the problem of tight quarters. In the second, fantasy interiors apart, there’s no escaping the headache of home maintenance.

Gregg and Mitchell Rechler, of Rechler Equity Partners, business partners and cousins, aim to bridge that gap with a pair of properties overlooking the Shinnecock Canal in Hampton Bays. One is the historic Canoe Place Inn, now Canoe Place Inn & Cottages, which they rebuilt in high style in 2022. The other is Canoe Place Boathouses, a collection of thirty-seven three-story, two- and three-bedroom townhouse condominiums, some with boat slips and floating docks. The townhouses come fully furnished and equipped, down to the last bath towel (and not just any furniture – the interiors are the work of the decorator Benjamin Noriega-Ortiz, and each unit is slightly different).

What’s more, residents are encouraged to avail themselves of the Inn’s amenities, including a full-service spa, bar, and restaurant. The Boathouses also offer a slew of other niceties. On request, the on-site property management team can arrange to have someone stock your fridge, walk your dog, wash your car, look after your house plants, and cook dinner in your own home or aboard a chartered yacht – in short, all manner of luxury services may be obtained. And when you’re away, management will look after the place too, should you wish them to. “We call it ‘lock and leave'” says Gregg Rechler.

The Canoe Place Inn came first. Gregg and Mitchell bought the property in 2005. By Gregg’s account, it was in a sorry state, a far cry from its glory years from the 1920s to the late 1940s, when members of New York’s upper-crust, film stars, politicians, and others of note passed through its doors.

“The place was in horrible shape,” says Gregg. “People said it could never be brought back to life. Mitch and I would stand outside the inn and people would honk their horns as they drove by and yell ‘Tear it down!’.” That was in fact their plan, but as the partners sifted through old photos, and they learned that Theodore Roosevelt, Babe Ruth, and Albert Einstein had once stopped at the inn, which had operated as a speakeasy during Prohibition, they had a change of heart. “It was so rich in history that we fell in love with the place,” Gregg says. “How could you not? It became a passion project.”

And what a project it was. Once the restoration phase was complete, Gregg and Mitchell brought in the brilliant multi-disciplinary design studio Workstead to reimagine the interiors. Gregg says they were aiming for the look of an inn that had “lived for a hundred years,” with styles of many different periods commingling in an aesthetically-pleasing way.

The discovery of a brick-herringbone floor (typically used outdoors) in the reception room beneath old wall-to-wall carpeting was the jumping-off point for the new boutique hotel with its 20 guest rooms and five cottages. Given that they couldn’t salvage the brick, the Workstead team, came up with the idea of putting down new herringbone-brick floors that now extend through the hotel lobby to the library. They also installed a latticework ceiling in the lobby to further blur the boundaries between indoors and outdoors.

The rest of the project took shape organically, through a combination of diligent research and inspired guesswork. “Workstead came up with the concept ‘garden by the sea’, says Gregg, “and that set the tone for what we did throughout.” The furniture is a mix of pieces that were custom-designed by Workstead (such as the angular reception desk fashioned from reclaimed pine found on the premises), and carefully-selected pieces sourced from auction houses and artisanal workshops and which take their stylistic bearings from the mid-20th century French design team Guillerme et Chambon as well as nautical and Wiener Werkstätte influences.

Vibrant contemporary artworks by Doug Aitkin, Tony Tasset, Jeremy Dennis, and others also set the tone.

“It was important to us to have world-class artists who align with the ethos of the new Canoe Place,” says Mitchell Rechler. “Art is part of our DNA.”

The Boathouses at Canoe Place are presented exclusively by Lori Schiaffino of Compass.

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(516) 606-7090

Click here for more details about the Canoe Place Boathouses