By David Hornung, Co-Founder & Principal Designer, D&J Concepts

The estate at 121 Further Lane in East Hampton has been telling the design story of the Hamptons for over a century. Jackie Kennedy Hamptons Lasata, as the property is now universally known, was not merely a childhood summer home. Rather, it was and remains a living document. Through residential architecture and interior design, it traces how American luxury has defined, abandoned, and redefined itself. Each owner left a design layer. In turn, each layer reflected its era’s relationship with wealth, taste, and East End light.

Even the name establishes the estate’s mythology. Lasata, which the Bouvier family said came from a Native American term, translates loosely as “place of peace.” Whether the etymology is precise matters less than what it reveals about the family who chose it. In fact, the Bouviers were performing a very American act of translation. They converted inherited money into landed identity, giving their retreat an origin story rooted in something deeper than a Park Avenue address.

The Arts and Crafts Foundation: 1917

Architect Arthur C. Jackson designed the original house in 1917 as an Arts and Crafts estate. This style valued handcraft, natural materials, and integration with landscape. Its gray stucco facade and the relationship between house and garden established spatial proportions that would survive every subsequent renovation. Crucially, Jackson understood something that designers working on the property a century later would rediscover. A building’s relationship to its land matters more than anything inside its walls.

Notably, the estate’s original program included features that reveal the Hamptons’ early identity as an agrarian retreat rather than a luxury resort. Extensive vegetable gardens, a grape arbor, and stables with a jumping ring blended English country house aspirations with American informality. Maude Bouvier’s “Italian garden” with boxwood hedging and classical statuary completed the picture. Architectural Digest would later describe Lasata’s grounds as among the most significant residential landscapes on the East End, a distinction that each subsequent owner recognized and preserved.

The Bouvier Decades: 1925-1950

John Vernou Bouvier Jr., known as “the Major,” acquired Lasata from his wife Maude in 1935. His family occupied the estate through the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Those decades coincided with the Hamptons’ transformation from farming community to social destination. Consequently, the Bouviers joined the Maidstone Club in 1926, embedding themselves in the institutional infrastructure of East Hampton society that persists, largely unchanged, today.

Young Jacqueline Bouvier spent summers at Jackie Kennedy Hamptons Lasata from roughly 1930 to 1950, developing the equestrian skills that would become part of her public identity. At eleven, she won a rare double victory in horsemanship at Madison Square Garden. The New York Times reported the achievement in 1940. Lasata’s grounds, with their riding facilities and proximity to the ocean, provided the setting for a childhood later mythologized as the origin story of American grace.

Yet the family’s departure in 1950 marked the end of that first identity. The Major had died in 1948. Soon after, the house was sold. Over time, the Bouvier era became memory, then legend, then the kind of provenance that adds millions to an asking price. What the family left behind was not merely a house but a narrative that every subsequent owner would either honor or attempt to transcend.

The Krakoff Intervention: 2007

Fashion designer Reed Krakoff, then creative director of Coach, purchased Lasata in 2007 for $24 million. By then, the property had been subdivided: Krakoff acquired seven acres with the house, while four acres were sold separately. Even that subdivision told a Hamptons story. Land values had risen to the point where the estate’s original 12-acre footprint exceeded what a single transaction could bear. The Hamptons were no longer a place where estates remained intact across generations. They were a market.

Krakoff’s renovation respected the architectural envelope while updating mechanical systems and interior finishes. His design approach reflected the era’s consensus luxury aesthetic: clean lines, neutral tones, and restrained elegance. Fashion industry professionals, trained to anticipate trends, often apply exactly this sensibility to residential environments. The house remained recognizable as Lasata while accommodating contemporary expectations for comfort and technology.

The Yovanovich Transformation: 2018

In 2018, film producer David Zander acquired the property for $24 million and commissioned Paris-based interior designer Pierre Yovanovich to create entirely new interiors. Yovanovich, known for what Elle Decor describes as a haute couture approach combining raw and refined materials, produced interiors that introduced European design sensibility to an American estate with European aspirations.

These interiors represented a clear departure from the property’s accumulated aesthetic history. Previous iterations had referenced Arts and Crafts origins or mid-century American traditionalism. Yovanovich, by contrast, introduced his Parisian signature: sculptural furniture, deliberate material contrasts, and spatial compositions that treated each room as an independent artistic statement rather than a node in a continuous domestic narrative.

Landscape architect Louis Benech, whom Architectural Digest considers among France’s most respected practitioners, redesigned the grounds. The gardens that Maude Bouvier had planted, that Perry Guillot had later refined, received another layer of European interpretation. However, century-old linden trees, London planes, and American elms survived every design intervention. They provided the continuity that the interiors did not.

The Ford Acquisition: 2023

Tom Ford purchased Jackie Kennedy Hamptons Lasata in 2023 for $52 million, more than doubling the property’s value in five years. As the former creative director of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent and a filmmaker whose visual discipline is legendary, Ford acquired not merely a house but a narrative property. Its cultural associations amplify its real estate value beyond what any comparable acreage would command.

Ford’s design intentions for the property have not been publicly disclosed. However, what his acquisition signals is significant. Perhaps the most visually literate buyer in American fashion chose a property whose design story spans a century. He chose a house that Arthur C. Jackson designed, that the Bouviers inhabited, that Krakoff updated, that Yovanovich transformed, and that now awaits yet another interpretation. The estate’s capacity to absorb design reinvention while maintaining its essential character, its relationship to land, light, and the particular quality of East Hampton’s atmosphere, is perhaps its most remarkable quality.

What Lasata Teaches Designers

D&J Concepts works on properties throughout the Hamptons that share Lasata’s fundamental design challenge: how to honor what exists while serving how people live now. The estate at 121 Further Lane demonstrates that the best renovations preserve spatial relationships and landscape connections while allowing interiors to evolve with each owner’s sensibility. Jackson’s architecture survived because it was right. The proportions work. The relationship to land holds. Everything inside those walls is temporary by comparison.

Harvard Business Review’s research on brand longevity parallels this principle: organizations that maintain core identity while adapting surface expression outlast those that chase transformation for its own sake. Lasata has maintained its core identity, its proportions, its landscape, its relationship to Further Lane and the Atlantic beyond, while absorbing radical interior transformations without losing coherence. That is the design lesson. That is what a century of evidence teaches.

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Read more: Jackie Kennedy to Tom Ford: Hamptons Style and Rooms That Outlast Trends: 25 Years of Proof.

David Hornung co-founded D&J Concepts in 2001 after training under Interior Design Hall of Fame inductee Steve Chase in Los Angeles. From Southampton headquarters, D&J serves clients across the Hamptons, Manhattan, Palm Beach, and Southern California. A member of the Society of Design Administration, Hornung brings 25 years of luxury residential design experience to every project. Discover the Visual Clarity Method at dandjconcepts.com.