‘Do They Look Bad to You?'

Joe Farrell keeps iterating on his divisive McMansions, no matter how much his detractors hate them.

- By Rachel Corbett

JOE FARRELL MAY BE one of the most hated men in the Hamptons, but his life there is "heaven on earth," he tells me.

"Did you know there's a happy gene? I was born with it." It's a sunny afternoon in June, and he's driving us around the area in a Range Rover, flashing his row of perfectly straight teeth as he points out, every minute or two, one of the more than 400 luxury homes he's developed in the Hamptons over the past three decades. The irritation his supersize houses cause some of his neighbors only makes him smile more. "Do they look bad to you? They're gorgeous!" he says, not waiting for an answer.

Farrell's signature properties look like the conjoined-twin (or -triplet) offspring of a classic Hamptons farmhouse—with two kitchens, two-story foyers, as many as 15 bedrooms, and several chimneys. His critics—often the artists, preservationists, and socialites of the East End's old guard—have described the spread of his beige McMansions like that of a disease, calling it the "Farrellization of the Hamptons."

"They are a play on the old farmhouses, but at ten times the size, they look abnormal," one longtime East Hampton artist tells me. "These billionaires could hire the best architects to design really interesting houses, but they prefer to buy off the shelf." Southampton's Harrison LeFrak, scion of the LeFrak real-estate dynasty, wrote in 2014 that "Farrell must be stopped from turning our historic village into a cheap, tacky Long Island suburb... It must not become a film set for The Real Housewives." For the most part, Farrell laughs off the criticism. "I take it as a compliment," he says.

(For LeFrak, he has harsher words: "He's a spoiled billionaire kid who's never done anything in his life.") In the years since, LeFrak's fears have in some ways come true. Farrell has continued churning out houses, one of which did appear on The Real Housewives in 2020.