Beyonce Knowles & Jay Z's House

Beyoncé went from Destiny’s Child in the late 1990s to the most Grammy wins of any artist. Jay-Z, her husband since 2008, went from his 1996 debut Reasonable Doubt to Forbes’s first hip-hop billionaire in 2019.

Behind the Hedges and Domino credit the original design to Stanford White, architect of the Washington Square Arch. Builder Jeffrey Collé later turned the whole house 90 degrees so the living room faced west over the pond.

Georgica Pond has been cut open to the ocean since before colonists arrived, when Indigenous people dug through the sand with clam shells. The East Hampton Town Trustees still open it each spring and fall.

For about 200 years, Dan Rattiner wrote in Dan’s Papers, church bells summoned townspeople to dig that channel. Anyone who skipped the call could end up in the stocks.

Beyoncé and Jay-Z bought the house in September 2017, after 8 years on the market. It was their first Hamptons purchase, Behind the Hedges reported, after years of summer rentals in the area.

In 2022 the couple made an offer on a vacant stretch of pondfront nearby, land architect Richard Meier first bought in 1972. The Peconic Land Trust bought it instead for $8.5M, so it stays wildlife habitat.

Renting came first. A Harvard Business School teaching study, reported by TIME in 2014, says Beyoncé’s 2013 self-titled album was written in a rented Hamptons house in summer 2012, with 5 or 6 rooms set up as studios.