Beach Brains

Scrappy materials and a shrewd layout transform a 1950s Fire Island home into a compact case study in ingenuity

- —FRED A. BERNSTEIN

Fire Island, the sandbar that parallels the south shore of Long Island for 32 miles, is home to more than a dozen communities, each with its own style. The Pines, for instance, is noted for gay revelry amid geometrically precise houses by Horace Gifford, Harry Bates, and other important modernist architects. To its west, Cherry Grove is an enclave of smaller houses with less architectural cachet. But what they lack in pedigree they make up for in panache—with kitschy ornamentation and droll nicknames (Deer Abbey, Chalet of the Dolls, Sin and Tonic). John Woell, a partner at the AD100 firm Steven Harris Architects, has spent more than 20 summers in the Grove with his husband, Fernando Iglesias, a Madrid-born marketing executive. Most years, they rented half of a barnlike 1950s building that had been divided down the middle into mirror-image units. Theirs was called Tweedle Dee; the other, of course, Tweedle Dum.