Hamptons Horse Country

Dennis Suskind wouldn’t mind living the life of a horse.

“Someone bathes them twice a day, massages them, feeds them and then takes them to Florida in the wintertime,” the Hampton Classic Horse Show president laughed at his table last Thursday under the Grand Prix tent in Bridgehampton. “Not a bad life. Not bad at all.”

It’s a reality for hundreds of horses boarding in the 40-odd commercially and privately owned barns on the East End, an industry that has grown over the last four decades just as the Classic has developed, Mr. Suskind explained.

This year, the Classic was as big as it could get, he said. The show’s 1,700 stalls saw 2,100 horses from Maine to Florida, the East End to Chicago, and as far west as California, he reported.

“I’m not suggesting that the Hampton Classic has led the way, but if you go back, let’s say, during my time, if you go back 35 years here, you had a few local horse farms,” Mr. Suskind recalled. “You had Swan Creek, Topping Riding Club and a few others. And now, there’s a whole array of horse farms like those, and private horse farms where people have their own stables for their own enjoyment.”

Raising horses is no easy task, especially without a crew. “Backyard owners,” as Mr. Suskind calls them, can get away with owning one or two horses and taking care of them on their own property, he said, but others who have 10 to 20 stalls need to hire crews.

On the large scale, horse farming becomes quite involved. In Sagaponack, the Wölffer Estate Vineyard’s stables, for example, carry 100 horses through the season, about 50 of which stay year-round, according to Executive Vice President and General Manager John Nida.

A barn that size requires 15 grooms and four trainers, and it is a $2 million operation, Mr. Nida said, which was born from the passion of the late Christian Wölffer, the vineyard’s founder who died in 2008 and at one time owned 25 horses himself.

“He loved horses. He was an avid rider and he absolutely loved the equestrian side,” Mr. Nida recalled, seated at one of the vineyard’s tables under the Grand Prix tent last Thursday. “In fact, he started the stables before he started the winery. When I started six years ago, I didn’t have experience either in equestrian or wine. With Christian, it’s always a baptism by fire. He was a great, great mentor for me, but he was also the toughest person I’ve ever had to work for. So the bar was set very high early on.”

When the founder died just after the economy tanked, Mr. Nida had no choice but to sell all of his horses, eliminating thousands of dollars from the barn’s revenue stream, he said. To make up for the loss, he implemented a dry-stall rental program. And now the barn is more successful than ever, he said.

The 50,000-square-foot stables include an Olympic-sized indoor riding ring and a dressage ring, and the 75 acres feature three outdoor jump rings and a Grand Prix field, Mr. Nida said. The barn burns through 800 to 1,000 bales of hay and up to $200,000 worth of food per month during the summer season, he said.

“We had to really remodel the business,” he said. “Because we’re a barn out here in the Hamptons, while we consider ourselves a show-jumping barn, it is not the most ideal location to operate because there are just so many transient people who come in and out. There are very few year-round people here.”

Last month’s sale of 8 and 9 Five Rod Highway in Wainscott suggests a shift away from the horse industry on parts of the East End. The 15-acre property, which formerly operated as a family-run horse farm, sold for $25 million—the largest closing the hamlet has ever seen, with the exception of the $45 million sale in 2005 of Burnt Point, an 18,000-square-foot spec house situated on 45 acres overlooking Georgica Pond.

“Presently, there are a number of structures associated with a commercial horse farm on the property, including a riding ring, barns and stables, as well as a number of houses,” Southampton Press real estate analyst and Brown Harris Stevens associate broker Phelan Wolf noted in his Transaction Highlights column in the Labor Day issue last week. “If the new owners are riders, some of the farm buildings may remain, but the construction of much larger homes is inevitable.”

However, both Mr. Suskind and Mr. Nida said they beg to differ. While they could not comment specifically on the Wainscott sale, they said that horse farming in the Hamptons continues to be healthy and viable.

“The horse industry is very important to this area,” Mr. Suskind said. “What’s prettier than driving down a road and seeing a big field with a few horses grazing or somebody just riding their horse on the road? It was much easier 25 years ago. I could take my horse and go from one field to another. Now there’s a lot of houses around. But it still adds to the beauty of the area.”

Mr. Suskind, who splits his time between Bridgehampton and Manhattan, first began riding 32 years ago thanks to his, at the time, 8-year-old son, Brian. They were looking for an activity to do together, so they took up riding lessons at Swan Creek Farm in the hamlet.

But Brian proved to be allergic to horses.

“So he stopped and I continued,” Mr. Suskind said. “I found it exhilarating. Working with another living being—equine and human—and being able to communicate with your hands and your legs and being able to go over a fence. Then, I was competing here in a very low jumper class and something bothered me and I complained about it and the next thing I knew, I was on the board. What our objective now is to just do it better every year. Riders come to this show from all over to compete, not to practice.”