A Couple Whose Home is a Gift for Many

PHOTO CAPTIONS

• A couple whose home is a gift
• Proceeds from the property's sale will benefit gay and lesbian charities.
• The couple designed and built the house in the late '80s, and they hosted many a magnificent party there.
• Auer and Barham in their garden; Barham died in June, Auer in 2000.

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Flowers have played a major role in many a love story. It was no exception for John Barham and Richard "Dick" Buer.

In the last chapter of their decades-long relationship, Auer and Barham retired to a custom-built home on two acres in Bridgehampton, which the avid gardeners spent two years turning into a Southern-style paradise of flowering shrubs and trees.

The property – including the four-bedroom, 5 ½ bathroom wood-shingled house – has been put on the market for $7.995 million with Cee Scott Brown and Jack Pearson of The Corcoran Group.

The couple - together for 45 years, until Auer died in 2000 - was known for the magnificent parties they threw on the property, with guests such as Martha Stewart, Julie Andrews and Peter Jennings, says Barry Skovgaard, a friend of the couple's and the executor of their estate (Barham died in June at age 89). They were also thrilled to have guests drop in and stroll by the espaliered apple trees that grew along the garden walls, as well as the flowering magnolia trees, beeches, chestnuts and sequoias.

Friends enjoyed discovering the hundreds of garden ornaments - many stone, marble and bronze sculptures of animals, commissioned from Asia - hidden along the meandering pathways, and they were entertained by 72 birdhouses mounted on top of 8-foot-high posts.

"They set up the garden to be a beautiful place," Skovgaard says. "They loved when people would stop by on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon and they would stroll in the garden with you. They were so proud of the gardens, and they loved showing them off."

FOCUS ON DESIGN

Barham, who developed a passion for gardening at a young age and studied at the Parsons School of Design in the 1940s, drew up the blueprints for the Bridgehampton house, working with architect Arthur Peterson of Richmond, Va. While Auer and Barham developed the property to maximize enjoyment of the outdoor space, the materials in the house were by no means secondary. Barham, who wanted to build a house with a mature look, sourced floorboards and ceiling beams from a former tobacco plantation in Virginia, where he grew up, and used cypress shingles on the exterior.

"Although he was retired, he wanted to build a house that would last for 150 years," Skovgaard says.

Elizabeth Lear of the East End's Lear & Mahoney Landscape Design Associates, recalls the summer garden parties the couple would throw in the years after they built the house in the late 1980s.

"At the time, I think he was one of a handful who took a serious interest in their landscapes," Lear says of Barham.

The property included a garden shed, the exterior modeled after a one-room home on the North Fork, owned by a fisherman and his wife that Barham often passed and admired. "They must have really loved each other to live for so long in that small place," Barham mused in the 2011 book "Stylish Sheds and Elegant Hideaways: Big Ideas for Small Backyard Destinations."

The men's life together was made up of many spaces. Soon after they met over a drink at the Plaza Hotel's Oak Bar, Auer, who worked for Standard Oil, told Barham that the company was sending him to South America

“John said, 'When do we leave?'” Skovgaard recalls.

WORLD TRAVELERS

Over the next few decades, the couple lived together in Brazil, Peru and San Francisco.

There were also many other gardens. Before he met Auer, Barham rented a ground-floor apartment at the foot of the Eiffel Tower in post-World War II Paris. While a fence prevented tourists from getting a full view of the garden facing the underside of the tower, Barham planted flowering vines that visitors could see the top of the fence. In New York City, where Barham worked as a decorator at Lord & Taylor, he filled the balcony of his apartment with flowers and shrubs, which delighted one of his neighbors, burlesque entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee.

While their love story has come to end, Auer and Barham are making sure that other couples also have the opportunity to put down roots. Nearly half of their estate, including proceeds from the sale of the home, will benefit gay and lesbian charities.