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AN ENCHANTING STORY OF HOW A SINGLE GIRL'S COTTAGE GREW MAGICALLY INTO A FAMILY HOME

Attention, all unmarried women! Do you hope to wed and one day start a family? If so, Cinderella, forget that glass slipper and dip your toe into real estate. Buy a house, renovate it and Prince Charming might come a-riding.

Truth be told, this is how it happened for Tracy Mitchell, then a television executive with her own company, At the Beach Productions, based in Sagaponack, where she now lives with her husband, Blaze Makoid, and their two-year-old daughter, Alexandra. Much has changed in her love life and decor since she first spied a 700-square-foot, two-bedroom cottage back in 1995.

"I was in my mid-30s and I'd been coming out to the Hamptons since my early 20s. I was getting too old for the share-house thing," Mitchell recalls. "I needed a new foundation and a place I could call home."

After purchasing the modest 1940s cottage, she lived happily ever after—or at least until she tired of hauling wet beach towels to the laundromat. A simple wish for a washer and dryer literally turned Mitchell's life around. Her property's tight setbacks meant adding a laundry room that would ruin views of an ample backyard. What to do? Lift the cottage up, flip it around 180-degrees and build a ground floor with 10-foot ceilings beneath.