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

The Guardian

a day ago

Posters advertising a 'bear weekend' cling to the utility poles on Fire Island, punctuating the wooden boardwalks that meander through a lush dune landscape of beach grass and pitch pine. It's not a celebration of grizzlies, by the looks of the flyers, but of large bearded men in small swimming trunks, bobbing in the pools and sprawled on the sundecks of mid-century modernist homes. You might also find them frolicking in the bushes of this idyllic car-free island, a nature reserve of an unusual kind that stretches in a 30-mile sliver of sand off the coast of Long Island in New York.
Over the last century, Fire Island Pines, as the central square-mile section of this sandy spit is known, has evolved into something of a queer Xanadu. Now counting about 600 homes, it is a place of mythic weekend-long parties and carnal pleasure, a byword for bacchanalia and fleshy hedonism – but also simply a secluded haven where people can 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 dedicated to celebrating the modern architecture of the island. The palpable sense of community and liberation here is, he says, 'what happens when people who are accustomed to a certain degree of fear no longer feel it.'
That was even more the case for Horace Gifford, an architect who arrived here in 1960, aged 28 and bored with working in a dull office in Manhattan and determined to make his mark in the sand. Over the next two decades, the young Floridian would build 63 holiday homes here, channelling his native beach culture into a seductive vision of breezy, timber-framed modernism that would define the look of the Pines – and beach homes – for the rest of the century.
Long before the term sustainability was invented, Gifford's houses were models of compact, light-touch living with the land. While others were building sprawling mansions in the Hamptons, Gifford encouraged his clients to reduce their footprints, strip away extraneous details, and submit to what Rawlins describes as 'an artful form of camping'. Clad with planks of raw cedar inside and out, interspersing solid volumes with walls of glass, and crowned with angled roofs to 'reach out and grab for light', his homes felt at one with the island – and celebrated its sexually liberated way of life with voyeuristic relish.
Few had heard of Gifford until Rawlins began digging in the archives for his seminal book, Fire Island Modernist, first published in 2013 and long out of print, but now expanded and updated with new photography and additional homes. Gifford had been criminally overlooked, in part thanks to his own criminal record, which had put him off ever applying for his architect's licence, in a state where licensed professionals had to be 'of good moral character'. Like many others of the period, Gifford was arrested during a police raid on Fire Island in 1965, in a dune cruising zone known as the Meat Rack. Such raids happened throughout the 60s, with police threatening felony sodomy charges for anyone who challenged their misdemeanour arrests. Names were published in newspapers and careers ground to a halt. 'They would entrap and beat the crap out of the guys,' recalls one of Gifford's clients in the book, 'then drag them down the boardwalks and corral them at the harbour-front like dead fish!'
Gifford's arrest might have put paid to his professional licensure, but that didn't hinder his success on Fire Island. He was a statuesque, charismatic blond, who had been voted 'best looking boy' at school, and few could resist his charms. He turned heads as he strode down the beach from meeting to meeting, 'wearing a Speedo and carrying an attache case', as one amused client recalls. He once hosted an elegant black-tie party – where that was the only item of dress people wore.
'He understood his power over people,' says Rawlins. And he started how he meant to go on. He stole his first Fire Island commission from another architect by seducing the clients, with whom he briefly formed a throuple. 'He affected a quiet vulnerability,' recalls one college friend, who majored in psychology, and found Gifford a fascinating study. 'But he was anything but. He was ferociously narcissistic.'
It worked a charm with the press. A 1964 issue of The American Home magazine 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', while the New York Times singled out his work in a travelling exhibition of beach house architecture the same year. They highlighted his treehouse-like design for textile designer Murray Fishman, raised on a series of chunky wooden columns, which doubled up as hidden cupboards. As Gifford joked to Fishman: 'You will now have 20 closets to come out of.'
Sometimes the references were more risque. In a chapter titled Form Follows Foreplay, Rawlins describes how Gifford designed a fur-lined 'make-out loft' for Stuart Roeder, a Warner Brothers' PR man known for his wild parties. With its lusty loft suspended above a couch-rimmed conversation pit, the house provided a lurid backdrop for the 1970 pornographic film, The Fire Island Kids. A year later, the island provided the setting for Boys in the Sand, the first gay porn film to go mainstream, which cemented the Pines' reputation as a place of 'bronzed skin, stripped-bare facades of cedar and glass, flaxen hair, and shimmering pools,' as Rawlins writes.
It was the perfect calling card for Gifford's more raunchy work, which included homes with multi-man outdoor showers, bathrooms with big picture windows facing the boardwalks and 'telescoping' interiors, choreographed like stage sets for the enjoyment (and enticement) of passersby. Gifford would even sometimes commission 'peephole' style photographs of the interiors, as if to hint at the imminent indiscretions.
As Fire Island's reputation grew, so did the fame of its residents. In 1977, after divorcing his first wife, Calvin Klein bought one of Gifford's beachfront homes. He then hired the architect to convert it into a souped-up party pad, adding a black-lined pool, a 'pool boy's quarters', a gym and a garden. 'It was amazing,' Klein recalled in 2013, 'the ultimate hedonist house. I mean, it was made for sex.' Following a series of unsympathetic additions, Rawlins is now busy restoring the house to its original splendour, as he has for a number of other homes in the Pines.
By the 1970s, Gifford's designs had evolved from their humble beach shack origins. As the island's foliage matured, the ground enriched by leaching septic tanks, he developed 'upside down' floor plans that raised sunny living areas above shaded bedrooms. Budgets also grew. The owners of Broadway Maintenance, a lighting company, commissioned Lipkins House, a home that pulsated along the beachfront with disco energy. Inside, a sunken living area led down to a windowless den lined with electric blue shag carpet and a mirrored ceiling, with lights that throbbed in time to the music. Its current owners are delighted with its ingenious details, like a hidden bar, cylindrical showers and clever sun-loungers that can be lifted out of the poolside wall, all still intact.
'We bought it just as Hurricane Sandy hit,' they tell me. 'Both our neighbours lost their pools and their decks, but miraculously we were OK.' They look out at the beach, across a freshly planted protective sand berm, studded with clumps of new grass like a hair transplant. It was recently rebuilt, at a cost of $52m, after the previous $207m beach fortification – completed in 2019 and designed to withstand a 44-year storm event – was washed away in just four years. 'We shouldn't even be allowed to have houses here,' the owner tells me, with a guilty look. '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 once. Just as it reached its free-spirited, out-of-the-closet peak of liberation, Gifford's generation was wiped out by Aids, the architect himself included, at the age of 59. The island became a ghostly place of mourning in the 1980s and 90s. But it is booming once again. House prices have rocketed, fuelled by the Covid pandemic and the arrival of high-speed internet, with the island's fame boosted by a 2022 romcom bearing its name. Sexual freedom has also been turbo-charged once again by the advent of PrEP, an HIV-preventive drug.
Homes are getting bigger too, as new owners join lots together and bulldoze the quaint shacks of old, with an eye for lucrative short-term rentals. Watching the waves crash against the shore, as contractors drive piles for ever bigger, bloated beach houses, raised up on stilts against the floods, Gifford's light-touch legacy looks just as fragile as ever.