‘Made for sex’: the hedonistic celebration palaces of New York’s Fire Island – and the blond bombshell who made them

Posters promoting a “bear weekend” hang to the software poles on Fire Island, punctuating the wood boardwalks that meander via a lush dune panorama of seashore grass and pitch pine. It’s now not a birthday celebration of grizzlies, by means of the appearance of the flyers, however of enormous bearded males in small swimming trunks, bobbing within the swimming pools and sprawled at the sundecks of mid-century modernist houses. You may also to find them frolicking within the trees of this idyllic car-free island, a nature reserve of an extraordinary type that stretches in a 30-mile sliver of sand off the coast of Long Island in New York.

Over the closing century, Fire Island Pines, because the central square-mile segment of this sandy spit is understood, has advanced into one thing of a queer Xanadu. Now counting about 600 houses, this can be a position of mythic weekend-long events and carnal excitement, a byword for bacchanalia and fleshy hedonism – but in addition merely a secluded haven the place other people can also be themselves.

“My most vivid memory of my first visit here in the late 90s is being able to hold my boyfriend’s hand in public without fear,” says Christopher Rawlins, architect and co-founder of Pines Modern, a non-profit devoted to celebrating the fashionable structure of the island. The palpable sense of neighborhood and liberation this is, he says, “what happens when people who are accustomed to a certain degree of fear no longer feel it.”

That was once much more the case for Horace Gifford, an architect who arrived right here in 1960, elderly 28 and uninterested in operating in a lifeless place of work in Manhattan and decided to make his mark within the sand. Over the following 20 years, the younger Floridian would construct 63 vacation houses right here, channelling his local seashore tradition right into a seductive imaginative and prescient of breezy, timber-framed modernism that will outline the glance of the Pines – and seashore houses – for the remainder of the century.

Long sooner than the time period sustainability was once invented, Gifford’s homes had been fashions of compact, light-touch dwelling with the land. While others had been development sprawling mansions within the Hamptons, Gifford inspired his purchasers to cut back their footprints, strip away extraneous main points, and publish to what Rawlins describes as “an artful form of camping”. Clad with planks of uncooked cedar in and out, interspersing forged volumes with partitions of glass, and topped with angled roofs to “reach out and grab for light”, his houses felt at one with the island – and celebrated its sexually liberated way of living with voyeuristic relish.

Few had heard of Gifford till Rawlins started digging within the archives for his seminal ebook, Fire Island Modernist, first printed in 2013 and lengthy out of print, however now expanded and up to date with new pictures and further houses. Gifford were criminally lost sight of, partially due to his personal legal file, which had put him off ever making use of for his architect’s licence, in a state the place authorized pros needed to be “of good moral character”. Like many others of the duration, Gifford was once arrested all through a police raid on Fire Island in 1965, in a dune cruising zone referred to as the Meat Rack. Such raids took place during the 60s, with police threatening legal sodomy fees for any person who challenged their misdemeanour arrests. Names had been printed in newspapers and careers flooring to a halt. “They would entrap and beat the crap out of the guys,” recollects one in all Gifford’s purchasers within the ebook, “then drag them down the boardwalks and corral them at the harbour-front like dead fish!”

Gifford’s arrest may have put paid to his skilled licensure, however that didn’t obstruct his good fortune on Fire Island. He was once a statuesque, charismatic blond, who were voted “best looking boy” in school, and few may withstand his charms. He grew to become heads as he strode down the seashore from assembly to assembly, “wearing a Speedo and carrying an attache case”, as one amused shopper recollects. He as soon as hosted a chic black-tie celebration – the place that was once the one merchandise of get dressed other people wore.

“He understood his power over people,” says Rawlins. And he began how he supposed to move on. He stole his first Fire Island fee from some other architect by means of seducing the purchasers, with whom he in brief shaped a throuple. “He affected a quiet vulnerability,” recollects one faculty good friend, who majored in psychology, and located Gifford a captivating find out about. “But he was anything but. He was ferociously narcissistic.”

It labored a attraction with the clicking. A 1964 factor of The American Home mag declared Gifford to be “undoubtedly the top beach-house designer in the country”. Another newspaper headline in 1968 cooed “He Sends Cutting Edges into the Sky”, whilst the New York Times singled out his paintings in a travelling exhibition of seashore area structure the similar 12 months. They highlighted his treehouse-like design for textile fashion designer Murray Fishman, raised on a sequence of chunky wood columns, which doubled up as hidden cabinets. As Gifford joked to Fishman: “You will now have 20 closets to come out of.”

Sometimes the references had been extra risque. In a bankruptcy titled Form Follows Foreplay, Rawlins describes how Gifford designed a fur-lined “make-out loft” for Stuart Roeder, a Warner Brothers’ PR guy recognized for his wild events. With its lusty loft suspended above a couch-rimmed dialog pit, the home equipped a lurid backdrop for the 1970 pornographic movie, The Fire Island Kids. A 12 months later, the island equipped the surroundings for Boys within the Sand, the primary homosexual porn movie to move mainstream, which cemented the Pines’ recognition as a spot of “bronzed skin, stripped-bare facades of cedar and glass, flaxen hair, and shimmering pools,” as Rawlins writes.

It was once the easiest calling card for Gifford’s extra raunchy paintings, which incorporated houses with multi-man outside showers, toilets with giant image home windows dealing with the boardwalks and “telescoping” interiors, choreographed like degree units for the joy (and enticement) of passersby. Gifford would even once in a while fee “peephole” taste pictures of the interiors, as though to trace on the impending indiscretions.

As Fire Island’s recognition grew, so did the celebrity of its citizens. In 1977, after divorcing his first spouse, Calvin Klein purchased one in all Gifford’s beachfront houses. He then employed the architect to transform it right into a souped-up celebration pad, including a black-lined pool, a “pool boy’s quarters”, a health club and a lawn. “It was amazing,” Klein recalled in 2013, “the ultimate hedonist house. I mean, it was made for sex.” Following a sequence of unsympathetic additions, Rawlins is now busy restoring the home to its authentic splendour, as he has for a collection of different houses within the Pines.

By the 1970s, Gifford’s designs had advanced from their humble seashore shack origins. As the island’s foliage matured, the bottom enriched by means of leaching septic tanks, he evolved “upside down” ground plans that raised sunny dwelling spaces above shaded bedrooms. Budgets additionally grew. The homeowners of Broadway Maintenance, a lights corporate, commissioned Lipkins House, a house that pulsated alongside the beachfront with disco power. Inside, a sunken dwelling space led all the way down to a windowless den covered with electrical blue shag carpet and a reflected ceiling, with lighting that throbbed in time to the tune. Its present homeowners are overjoyed with its inventive main points, like a hidden bar, cylindrical showers and artful sun-loungers that may be lifted out of the poolside wall, all nonetheless intact.

“We bought it just as Hurricane Sandy hit,” they inform me. “Both our neighbours lost their pools and their decks, but miraculously we were OK.” They glance out on the seashore, throughout a freshly planted protecting sand berm, studded with clumps of recent grass like a hair transplant. It was once just lately rebuilt, at a value of $52m, after the former $207m seashore fortification – finished in 2019 and designed to resist a 44-year hurricane match – was once washed away in simply 4 years. “We shouldn’t even be allowed to have houses here,” the landlord tells me, with a in charge glance. “It’s a nature reserve. But the homes are ‘grand fathered’ in. When the hurricane hit, I thought, ‘My God, what have we done?’”

Fire Island Pines has already been decimated as soon as. Just because it reached its free-spirited, out-of-the-closet height of liberation, Gifford’s era was once burnt up by means of Aids, the architect himself incorporated, on the age of 59. The island become a ghostly position of mourning within the 1980s and 90s. But it’s booming as soon as once more. House costs have rocketed, fuelled by means of the Covid pandemic and the arriving of high-speed web, with the island’s repute boosted by means of a 2022 romcom bearing its identify. Sexual freedom has additionally been turbo-charged as soon as once more by means of the creation of PrEP, an HIV-preventive drug.

Homes are getting larger too, as new homeowners sign up for loads in combination and bulldoze the old fashioned shacks of previous, with an eye fixed for profitable temporary leases. Watching the waves crash in opposition to the shore, as contractors force piles for ever larger, bloated seashore homes, raised up on stilts in opposition to the floods, Gifford’s light-touch legacy appears simply as fragile as ever.