More than 40 years after building Tisbury Market Place, developer Sam Dunn is preparing to open a restaurant called Ocean Club in the former Old Stone Bank lobby, the final step in his most ambitious Island project yet.
More than 40 years after building Tisbury Market Place, his first development on Martha’s Vineyard, Sam Dunn is putting the finishing touches on his latest and most ambitious Island project: the transformation of a historic but long-vacant Vineyard Haven bank into a mixed-use condominium complex with apartments, offices, shopping and restaurants.
This month, an investment group led by Mr. Dunn is preparing to open a restaurant called Ocean Club in the former Old Stone Bank lobby on Main street, with August 25 the target opening date.
Unlike El Barco, the seasonal, outdoors taqueria in the bank’s former drive-through, Ocean Club will be open year-round with a more upscale food and beverage program and a nationally recognized chef, Marc Orfaly.
This week, Mr. Dunn gave the Gazette a tour of the new eatery, which includes a wine room in the former bank vault and a dining table made from the vault door.
The old bank vault door now serves as a table.
The old bank vault door now serves as a table.
The restaurant’s general manager is Tyler Shapiro, a 2013 graduate of Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School who has moved back to Oak Bluffs after working on the Boston hospitality scene for most of the past decade, most recently as manager at the Italian restaurant Bar Mezzano.
“I have always wanted to help open something, and a year-round property for the Island community was a big draw,” Mr. Shapiro said.
This is not Mr. Dunn’s first fine-dining rodeo: In 2008 he opened Saltwater in Vineyard Haven, later selling the restaurant to Mary and Jackson Kenworth, who renamed it Beach Road.
Other projects Mr. Dunn has developed on the Vineyard include the Woodland business center on State Road in Tisbury, the Barn Bowl and Bistro in Oak Bluffs and the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center in Tisbury Market Place.
Originally from Richmond, Va., Mr. Dunn, 84, discovered the Island in 1971 through someone he met at a wedding.
“He said he was building a house on Martha’s Vineyard, and that he knew a lot I could buy. And I said, ‘Well, what’s Martha’s Vineyard?’” he recalled.
Mr. Dunn and his wife visited the Island with their two-year-old firstborn and promptly bought a $3,500 building lot on Mink Meadows Road in Tisbury. An architect by trade and training, Mr. Dunn — whose given name is Reid, though he’s universally known as Sam — had never done any actual construction work before deciding to build an Island home for his young family.
“I built this hippie house, literally with my bare hands — I didn’t know what I was doing, but we’ve been here every single summer since then,” he said, in his light Southern drawl.
Like many other seasonal Island families of the time, Mr. Dunn and his wife would bring their children to the Vineyard once school let out and then he would go back to work in the Washington, D.C. area — eventually piloting his own small airplane, which he learned to fly at Trade Wind airfield in Oak Bluffs with Island aviator Carolyn Cullen.
“She flew in her bare feet,” recalled Mr. Dunn, who wound up making hundreds of flights to and from the Vineyard as he built his career.
New kitchen awaits its cooks.
New kitchen awaits its cooks.
After establishing his own architecture firm in Vineyard Haven, Mr. Dunn brought a young architect named Mark Hutker on board, noting his talent.
“It wasn’t long before I saw what he was going to be, [but] I was going in a different direction,” said Mr. Dunn, who had begun to realize that designing buildings for other people was not what he really wanted to do.
“I found being an architect kind of limiting, and I don’t do that well with clients,” he said.
Mr. Dunn sold his business in 1985 to Mr. Hutker, who has expanded it statewide under his own name.
Since then, Mr. Dunn has concentrated on property development that allows him to be his own client much of the time.
“I try to wear all the hats — not because I think I’m better at it than anyone, but you’re so much more agile when you’re the developer and the designer and the builder. You cut out all this middle-man stuff, [which] costs a lot more, of course, but also, it’s so cumbersome,” he said.
His all-the-hats approach has brought Mr. Dunn into conflict with permitting agencies many times over the years. Martha’s Vineyard Commission members are often vexed by new elements that weren’t on approved plans, resulting in Mr. Dunn having to come back for further approvals.
“I’ve been accused of doing things and asking permission later, which is to some extent true,” he said.
Nonetheless, Mr. Dunn said, the public review is an important part of the development process.
“I think the product is better this way. We can hate the boards, but the projects get better in the review they do,” he said.
Tisbury Market Place, built in 1984, was Mr. Dunn’s baptism by fire into the contentious world of Island land use politics.
“I was a young man, and it was kind of scary to find people so disparaging of what I thought were grand ideas,” he said, recalling opposition from Vineyard Gazette editor Henry Beetle Hough and others in the community.
“I just couldn’t get my mind around it — the place was completely derelict,” Mr. Dunn said of the Beach Road property, which now boasts a fish market, toy store, coffee and pizza shops and the film center.
The former bank vault now holds the restaurant's wine.
The former bank vault now holds the restaurant's wine.
“I’ve come to realize, there’s always flak,” added Mr. Dunn, who makes a point of representing himself in public hearings before local planning boards and the Martha’s Vineyard Commission.
“For one thing, I think the boards actually appreciate it [and] I just think it’s, again, a less cumbersome way of doing things,” he said.
This personal approach extends to other aspects of Mr. Dunn’s business dealings. He’s worked with just one painter, Billy Baldwin, throughout the entire Stone Bank redevelopment, and his Ocean Club investors are people he knows from the Vineyard.
Mr. Dunn is also a blue-water sailor who last year bought his first performance catamaran, which he recently sailed to Nantucket on a restaurant-sampling expedition with his new chef, Mr. Orfaly, and fellow Island architect Andrew Flake.
“I’ve sailed all my life, but recently I did age out of monohulls,” said Mr. Dunn, recalling past voyages to the Caribbean and to the Pacific through the Panama Canal.
Once Ocean Club is up and running, Mr. Dunn said, he doesn’t have another project immediately in the works — but he’s looking forward to a development he’s not officially involved with, the proposed Harborworks on Beach Road, for which his son is the principal architect.
“I just keep going,” Mr. Dunn said. “I’m 84. I can’t seem to stop.”
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