They Love Their $14.95 Million Hamptons House. The Problem? Their Dog Hates It

Shortly after Bryan Graybill and Daniel Dokos moved into their dream home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., in 2022, the couple realized they had a problem: Their beloved Covid dog, a redheaded goldendoodle named Rufus, didn’t like the house.

“He was sort of a little pouty,” said Graybill, an interior designer, who said they adopted Rufus from a dog breeder in Montecito, Calif., where they rode out the pandemic.

Now, the couple is doing what any self-respecting dog parents would do: They are moving.

“I’m slightly ashamed to admit that we’ve become ‘those people,’ making life decisions around our dog,” said Graybill. And yet, he said, “He’s the joy of our life.”

The house is coming on the market for $14.95 million, said Preston Kaye of Hedgerow Exclusive Properties, which is co-listing the property with Noble Black and Erica Grossman of Douglas Elliman . Graybill and Dokos, a lawyer, who also have homes in East Hampton and Montecito, plan to split their time between the two. They also have a place in New York City.

Before Rufus, Graybill said the couple thought the newly built Sag Harbor house would be their “forever home.”

When they got married in 2015, they lived mainly in East Hampton and began building a house there. During construction, they rented a place in Sag Harbor and unexpectedly fell in love with the area and bought property there, too. “It’s sort of a vibrant little town, even in the middle of winter,” Graybill said. They wound up renting out the newly built East Hampton house until recently.

In 2018, they paid $2.65 million for a nearly ½-acre property in Sag Harbor with about 110 feet of frontage on Upper Sag Harbor Cove. Graybill said at the time, the property had a modest, roughly 1,600-square-foot house built in the 1950s.

Graybill said he initially assumed the house would be overly-complicated to renovate because of its proximity to the water. “Buying the property was a roll of the dice,” he said. “We didn’t know how much we could do.”

As it turned out, they could do quite a bit.

Diving into historic research, the couple learned that a stretch of the now-defunct elevated railroad that once ran from Bridgehampton to Sag Harbor crossed a corner of their property, which was also home to a warehouse during the area’s whaling heyday in the 1800s.

With approval from local officials, Graybill and Dokos substantially renovated the 1950s home, building a roughly 4,200-square-foot house with five bedrooms in its footprint. “It required a huge feat of engineering acrobatics to figure it out,” Graybill said. Because the house is set back 12 feet from the water, they were able to add a pool, a pool house and a two-car garage between the house and the street.

Graybill said the property’s original 1880s building inspired him to commission a warehouse-like structure with loading dock doors, high ceilings and open spaces. Part two of the design was to convert the industrial space to a home, using features like interior window walls. Permitting took about three years, and it took another two years to complete construction.

Graybill said despite being smaller than their East Hampton home, which is about 6,500 square feet, the house in Sag Harbor felt “intimate” and had all the amenities they wanted, including a pool, a pool bar and an office that looks west over the cove and north over a marsh and bird sanctuary. Graybill, who trained in London under the late restaurant designer David Collins , said he adopted certain U.K. sensibilities in the Sag Harbor home, such as high-set windows to maximise natural light, and a “boot room” near the front door where visitors can sit and remove their shoes and coats. The large kitchen is a “working” kitchen with pots and pans hanging within reach. “It’s not a relaxation area,” he said. “You’re in the kitchen to cook.”

They spent about $8 million on construction, landscaping and hard and soft costs, Graybill said. “I thought it would be our forever home, so I really leaned into everything being custom.”

Graybill said they “went a little indulgent” on interior finishes like light fixtures, paint, plaster and kitchen appliances, and the windows were made in Charleston, S.C., by a company specialising in historic windows.

The median sale price in Sag Harbor was $1.9 million during the fourth quarter of 2023, down 12% from the prior-year period, according to real-estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel. But sales were up 61.5% year-over-year during the quarter, while inventory rose 16.8% compared with the fourth quarter of 2022.

Graybill said they designed the house before adopting Rufus, so there are no doggy amenities. “Gosh no, and as a result he sleeps in the bed with us and walks freely on whatever furniture he wants,” he said. After a romp on the beach, Rufus also bathes in their tub. (Graybill said part of the decision to move to East Hampton is that the house there has a covered porch where they can put a dog sink.)

Like other pet owners, Graybill and Dokos adopted Rufus during Covid when they were living in Montecito and spending more time at home. “Dan had never had a dog,” said Graybill, who grew up with poodles and lab retrievers and was initially reluctant to get a dog because he knew how much responsibility it would be. “We like our freedom,” he said.

But Graybill said one night as they lay in bed, Dokos texted him a picture of a local breeder’s two golden doodles. “One was William and one was Harry,” he recalled. When they went to see the dogs the next day, Harry—the smaller of the pups—ran right up to Dokos. They brought him home that afternoon and named him Rufus, which means redheaded in Latin. The trio fell into a new routine that included daily jaunts on the beach.

Graybill said when they moved to Sag Harbor, Rufus’ joyful demeanour changed.

They took him to nearby bay beaches, but they were narrow and a bit rocky. “The dog was constrained,” Graybill said. He couldn’t run as fast or as far as he had in California. “He couldn’t dig.”

Graybill said he and Dokos thought Rufus would acclimate until they drove to East Hampton one day and the dog was back in his element. “The smile on his face—if dogs could smile—I said to Dan, ‘I think the dog is happier in East Hampton,’” Graybill said.

Graybill said he has no regrets about deciding to sell the house, in part because he and Dokos enjoyed the building process together. “I’m giving up this life we wanted to build in Sag Harbor,” he said, “but I’m gaining this daily ritual of going to the beach with my husband and dog, and I just really cherish that.”

On a recent morning in Georgetown—Washington, D.C.’s oldest neighborhood—real-estate agent Jamie Peva strode down leafy N Street, brimming with historical tidbits.

Jackie Kennedy once lived on the street, he said. So did Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of the Washington Post, along with a former Miss America and a powerful U.S. Senator. Bradlee’s widow, author Sally Quinn, and Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, own stately homes there.

“I’ve seen a picture of Lyndon Johnson coming out of this house,” said Peva, passing a Federal-style brick mansion. “Also, the Beatles went to a lawn party here.”

Peva, a 60-year-old agent with Washington Fine Properties, has sold Georgetown real estate for over three decades, often traversing the neighborhood by bicycle. Of the roughly 2,500 houses in the historic neighborhood, he has been involved in the sale of 460, he estimated. A self-styled historian of the neighborhood, he knows stories behind its houses and their owners going back generations.

With a knack for lively storytelling, he shares his knowledge with some 37,500 Instagram followers, who have made Peva—sporting the bow ties he has worn since boarding school—an unlikely social-media influencer. Many of his followers are locals, and most have no plans to buy or sell real estate—until they do. It is then, according to Peva, that his spirited reels bring him to mind.

“It’s the digital version of a refrigerator magnet,” he said.

After Peva’s first video in November 2023, his eponymous Instagram account sparked a 10% increase in sales volume in the first year, and another 20% the next, he estimated. “It’s been very good for business, there is no question about it,” he said.

But Peva’s posts have also made him a local celebrity. As he walked down N street, the driver of a Mercedes station wagon slowed down to honk and wave. A lady walking a large dark gray dog stopped to ask what he was filming that day (a reel about a Colonial-era bottling plant.) Peva knew the dog from walking his two springers, Jumpy and Peggy-O, in the neighborhood.

“I need to make a video about the pooches of Georgetown,” he mused.

Jamie Peva shooting an upcoming Instagram reel on a historic house on P Street in Georgetown.

A growing number of real-estate agents now use social media to sell, and some have millions of followers with reels featuring ultraluxury pads, selling tips or reality TV-style reports on their daily lives. While Peva posts about his listings—and sometimes those of other agents—he mostly focuses on Georgetown history, local businesses and community events, saying his goal is to benefit both his business and the neighborhood.

“If we don’t find something genuinely interesting and worth sharing, we won’t do it,” said Peva’s daughter, Violet Peva, a New York social-media strategist who films, edits and posts his reels. “We cover many topics, not just real-estate information.”

Peva is originally from Connecticut, but has lived in Georgetown for over 30 years, currently in a cottage-style house with a white picket fence. Over the years, Georgetown has changed. The Georgetown Set, a powerful group of Cold War-era residents whose Sunday-night potluck dinners are said to have swayed U.S. policy, has long faded away. The community is still home to high-profile Washingtonians, including a Republican senator and several cabinet members. But it increasingly also attracts technology and finance executives, according to Peva. He now routinely signs nondisclosure agreements, ensuring privacy for wealthy clients. The shift has made him rethink his marketing approach.

“For years, a big part of our Georgetown business was made up of people who maintained a low profile,” he said. Real-estate agents were similarly low-key. Today, curb appeal is more important, he said, and agents are promoting themselves more. “As this change was underfoot, I was thinking that I needed to evolve myself too,” he said.

A street of colorful row houses in Georgetown.

Though his own social-media use is mostly limited to following sailing accounts, he asked his daughter to help him post his listings online. Violet, now 26, started coming to D.C. once a month to film his reels. After an early video, on a condominium building called the Elliott, her sister Fern called her to report: “Daddy’s blowing up on Instagram,” Violet recalled. The reel got over 50,000 views. The next two each drew over 300,000. Peva’s most popular post ever, with over 838,000 views, was about the Grateful Dead playing in Georgetown. Sometimes, Peva interviews Georgetowners such as Quinn, the author, or Jamie Stachowski, the owner of a local butcher shop.

Peva’s daughter, Violet Peva, shoots, edits and posts his reels.

Peva, who majored in history in college, now spends up to two hours a day on research, usually in the morning while on his stationery bike. Online, he pores over old newspapers or the Library of Congress website, and he has a collection of articles and books—in and out of print—about Georgetown.

Companies often approach Peva for promotional posts, he said, but he turns them down, feeling that followers would lose interest in constant commercials. One exception is a recent paid post on Mount Vernon, the former home of George Washington. Peva wanted to share its history, he said, and didn’t want to lose the opportunity to another Instagrammer.

Anthony Arend, a professor at Georgetown University, has lived in his current home for 19 years without any plans to sell or buy real estate. But he follows Peva and often likes his posts.

Peva at one of his listings, a 1870s house on Prospect Street.

“He is very charismatic, he is energetic, and he obviously knows a lot about the community,” said Arend, who has referred house-hunting friends to Peva.

One of Peva’s biggest deals—the $10.5 million sale of a 19th-century Italianate mansion—came after he made two 2024 reels featuring the property. In March, he sold the longtime O Street home of Tim and Jane Matz for $5.8 million after featuring it on his Instagram. Peva had showed them the home 25 years earlier, with Violet in a baby carrier on his back.

Last year, Kate Watts, 49, a digital consultant, called Peva to sell her late father’s three-bedroom house on Q Street; her husband had seen Peva on Instagram. In an October reel, Peva praised the architecture of the house, designed by modernist Hugh Newell Jacobsen. Halfway through, he mentioned an open house the next day, ending with an upbeat: “Did I also mention this house is for sale? $3.75 million!” The reel got 27,000 views, the open house was packed, and the buyers made an offer at the list price on the same day.

Peva often travels around Georgetown by bicycle.

They Love Their $14.95 Million Hamptons House. The Problem? Their Dog Hates It

Bryan Graybill and Daniel Dokos built their dream home in Sag Harbor but are now selling it because their goldendoodle Rufus gets “pouty” when he’s there

Georgetown agent Jamie Peva blends history and real estate on Instagram, turning local stories into a powerful sales strategy.