By Gabriela Afanador
Tuesday 24, March 2026
There are houses that exist simply as shelter, and then there are houses that seem to select their occupants with the quiet discrimination of an institution that knows exactly what it is. Lasata, the estate at 121 Further Lane in East Hampton, belongs firmly to the second category. Built in 1917 to the design of New York architect Arthur C. Jackson, who modeled it on a 16th-century Florentine villa and gave it an ivy-covered gray stucco facade, high-beamed ceilings, and tall casement windows oriented toward the Atlantic Ocean two blocks away, the property has spent over a century in the hands of people whose relationship to beauty, design, and cultural legacy has been anything but incidental. That the most recent of those people is Tom Ford, whose entire professional life has been organized around exactly those values, feels less like coincidence than like the house making one more considered choice.
The story of Lasata begins with George Wellington Schurman, a prominent Manhattan lawyer who commissioned Jackson to build the estate on twelve acres of East Hampton farmland he had purchased in 1915. His wife Helen, an active member of the Garden Club of East Hampton, curated the original grounds with a formal brick-columned garden house and an Italian sunken garden centered on a Baroque fountain, establishing from the very beginning the property’s dual identity as both a serious architectural statement and a deeply cultivated landscape. When the Schurmans relocated to Bedford Hills in 1923, the estate passed briefly through other hands before arriving at the family that would give it its name and its place in American cultural history.
The Bouviers and the Girl Who Grew Up There
The Bouvier family acquired Lasata in the mid-1920s, and the name they chose for it, drawn from the Algonquian language of the native Montaukett and Shinnecock peoples and translating to Place of Peace, captures something essential about what the property represented within their world. The family’s American story had begun a century earlier when Michel Bouvier, a French cabinetmaker from Pont-Saint-Esprit, emigrated to Philadelphia in 1815 following the Napoleonic Wars and built a considerable fortune through timber, coal, and real estate speculation after crafting fine furniture for Joseph Bonaparte at his New Jersey estate. By the time John Vernou Bouvier Jr., known locally as The Major, assumed full ownership of Lasata in 1935 following a substantial bequest from his Wall Street financier uncle, the property had become the center of the family’s summer life, a place where their accumulated history could breathe in salt air and open space.
Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was born on July 28, 1929, at Southampton Hospital and spent her childhood summers at Lasata from infancy until approximately 1941, and what the estate gave her during those years was not merely a backdrop for a privileged childhood but a specific and lasting education in how the physical world could be inhabited with intention and grace. The grounds included a stable for eight horses, a tack room, paddocks, and a jumping ring where she trained her favorite horse Danceuse under her grandfather’s guidance, eventually winning the horsemanship competition at the National Horse Show in Madison Square Garden in 1940 at the age of eleven. At ten, she wrote a poem at the estate called Sea Joy, a wistful piece about the desire to live permanently near the booming blue sea, and the longing it expresses for a particular kind of elemental belonging speaks to how deeply Lasata shaped her sense of what a life fully inhabited could look and feel like. When her father died in 1957, she personally directed his funeral arrangements and requested that the floral displays look like a summer garden, like Lasata in August, which is the kind of instruction that reveals everything about what a place meant to the person giving it.
The Major died in January 1948, and the costs of maintaining the estate proved unsustainable for his heirs. The property was sold in April 1950, ending more than two decades of Bouvier occupancy, and a family member reflecting on the loss described everything that came afterward as second-rate, a judgment that sounds like grief but also like accuracy.
A Century of Stewardship
The decades that followed brought the estate through several transitions before the modern era of high-design ownership that has carried it to its current state. The property re-emerged in the historical record around 1965 under the ownership of financier William M. Meehan and his wife Mimi, who occupied and maintained Lasata for forty years with a focus on preserving its Arts and Crafts character while modernizing its internal systems to mid-century standards. Mimi Meehan retained sole ownership following her husband’s death in 1986 and remained at the estate until her passing in 2005 at the age of 93, her contribution to local environmental conservation later recognized through the dedication of a native plant garden in East Hampton bearing her name. Their four-decade tenure was one of quiet, devoted custodianship, the kind that does not transform a property but ensures it survives intact for the people who will eventually know what to do with it.
In February 2007, Reed Krakoff, then president and creative director of Coach, and his wife interior designer Delphine Krakoff purchased the estate for $24 million and undertook the most comprehensive restoration the property had seen since its construction. Working alongside architect Mark Ferguson and landscape designer Perry Guillot, they approached the house with the particular intelligence of people who understood both its historical value and its structural needs. Modern Sheetrock was replaced with traditional plaster applied over metal laths to replicate the soft, uneven wall texture of the 1917 original. Damaged flooring was replaced with 200-year-old reclaimed oak that retained the characteristic creak of an antique house underfoot. Most remarkably, when the Krakoffs cut into the Louis XVI-style boiserie paneling a previous owner had installed in the living room, guided by a historic photograph of Jacqueline Bouvier, they discovered the original intact 1917 grid-pattern oak millwork underneath and restored it fully, a decision that required both the knowledge to recognize what they had found and the restraint to let it speak for itself. Perry Guillot simplified the formal Gilded Age plantings, filling the peripheral woodland with native linden, cedar, and rhododendron, bringing the landscape into a quieter and more considered relationship with the coastal environment.
Hollywood producer David Zander acquired the primary parcel of the estate for $24 million in January 2018 and introduced a Parisian modernism into the interior that suited the property’s original European inspiration without imitating it. He commissioned designer Pierre Yovanovich, who furnished the interiors with Charlotte Perriand chairs, custom Frits Henningsen sofas, and minimalist stainless steel pieces by Martin Szekely, and brought specialized artisans from Paris to apply custom painted finishes and matte plaster treatments to the walls, creating a clean and quietly sophisticated background for modern artwork including pieces by Helen Frankenthaler. French landscape architect Louis Benech redesigned the gardens into rolling green lawns bordered by mature linden, London plane, cork, and American elm trees, bringing a European spatial logic to the coastal American setting that felt both new and entirely natural.
Tom Ford and the House That Was Always Waiting
Tom Ford paid $52 million for Lasata in August 2023, a price that more than doubled its 2018 valuation despite the property having been reduced in acreage from eleven acres to 7.15 acres through an earlier subdivision, and the appreciation reflected precisely the kind of value that genuine design intelligence and historical provenance generate independent of raw measurements. The acquisition came in the wake of the $2.8 billion sale of his namesake fashion empire to Estée Lauder in late 2022, a transaction that represented the culmination of one chapter and the freedom to begin another, and the choices Ford has made with that freedom say something consistent and revealing about what he values. His real estate portfolio, which includes the Paul Rudolph modernist Halston Townhouse in Manhattan that he purchased in 2019 and restored meticulously to Rudolph’s original 1970s design, and the 1920s Mediterranean Revival Casa della Porta in Palm Beach with its coffered ceilings and hand-carved Romanesque stone doorway, describes a man who collects not properties but stories, and who understands that the most interesting stories are the ones already in the walls.
At Lasata, Ford’s approach follows the preservationist philosophy he has applied elsewhere, integrating contemporary technology beneath the surface of the historic architecture rather than against it. Acoustic systems are mounted behind plaster ceilings and turned into distributed sound panels. Climate control runs through shadow-line baseboard plenums integrated into the architectural transitions rather than through visible metal grilles. Fiber-optic lighting nodes are recessed into joinery reveals and millwork joints, and the primary mechanical equipment is located in remote crawlspaces, keeping the plaster walls and reclaimed oak floors entirely clear of modern intrusion. The result is a house that performs at the standard a contemporary owner requires while remaining exactly what it has always been, which is the only approach to a property of this age and significance that makes any real sense.
Over a century after Arthur Jackson drew the plans for a Manhattan lawyer’s summer estate on twelve acres of East Hampton farmland, Lasata remains what it has always been: a place that rewards the kind of attention most people do not know how to give. From Helen Schurman’s Italian gardens to Jacqueline Bouvier’s early morning rides, from the Krakoffs’ meticulous recovery of the original millwork to Tom Ford’s invisible modernization, the estate’s history reads less like a list of transactions than like a continuous conversation about what it means to inhabit a beautiful place with genuine care. That conversation is still ongoing, and its most recent participant seems, by every available measure, entirely equal to it.