A house in Sagaponack, twelve weekends, and the question every first-time renter asks me by mid-June: which Saturday is the one I am not supposed to miss? The Hamptons run on a calendar that locals never publish, and it makes the difference between a summer that feels like a magazine and a summer that feels like traffic on Route 27.
Memorial Day weekend is the opening, not the event. The houses are opened, the staff is back, the restaurants are testing the new menu. Nobody who lives there does anything spectacular this weekend — the Saturday is for the supermarket and the drive. The Sunday lunch at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor is the soft opening of the social year. Skip the late dinners; everyone is still on a city bedtime.
Polo Hamptons takes the Saturdays of 18 and 25 July at 900 Lumber Lane in Bridgehampton. Four to seven in the afternoon, ticketed, with the field clientele that produces the season's first set of photographs. The 18 July match is the one — earlier in the calendar, fuller list, the rosé still cold. Bring flat shoes and book the dinner at Sant Ambroeus Southampton afterward; the table at 9 p.m. on a Polo Saturday is the harder reservation of the night.
August is Wölffer territory. The Wine Stand at Wölffer Estate runs Friday sunsets and Saturday afternoons through the month, and the Friday at the end of the first week is the one the houses begin to fill for. It is unticketed, casual, and the closest thing the East End has to a village green. The Hampton Classic — the horse show at Snake Hollow Road in Bridgehampton — closes the month over the week ending the Sunday before Labor Day. Grand Prix Sunday is the date; the box lunch is the social moment, the jumping is the alibi.
Labor Day is the close. The houses are still full, the city has emptied into them, and the dinner the Saturday night is the one that runs longest. After that the calendar resets to weekday-only locals and the contractors arrive on Tuesday. The renters who stay through the second week of September quietly tell the others they have discovered the best week of the summer. They have.
— Camille Vedy
