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Fire at Larry Gagosian’s Hamptons Estate
At about 4:45 p.m. on Wednesday, May 21, a fire alarm went off at Toad Hall, mega-dealer Larry Gagosian‘s Hamptons property. The alarm summoned firefighters to the Amagansett estate and, eventually, to the crawl space in its guest house, where an electrical fire appeared to have broken out, the East Hampton Star reports. Firefighters used thermal imaging devices to check behind the walls of the guest house to discover the cause and extent of the fire.
The flare-up did not affect Toad Hall itself. The iconic 11,000-square-foot modernist home was designed by late architect Charles Gwathmey for François de Menil in 1978 and completed in 1982. Gagosian bought the Further Lane property for $8 million in 1990.
This is not Toad Hall’s first time with the fire department. In a far more devastating incident on June 29, 2011, sparks caused by plumbing work started a fire that took some 50 firefighters in order to subdue. When the smoke cleared, the kitchen, media room—perhaps the same one that cost $250,000 and was crowned the Hamptons’s “most technically superior screening room” in a New York Times feature last summer—and a bedroom had sustained serious damage.
No art was damaged in the 2011 fire, thanks to Gagosian’s quick-acting caretaker. The fate of the guest house’s art collection, however, remains unknown after Wednesday’s blaze.
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