Glenn Rice’s journey to proudly owning a home on Hearth Island, N.Y., commenced unexpectedly in Boston and was propelled, remarkably, by his adore of theater.
In September 2017, Mr. Rice, a real estate agent, frequented Boston to see a mate perform in the opening evening of the play “WARHOLCAPOTE.” At a supper afterward, he befriended Rob Roth, the playwright who wrote the show.
“We just started chatting and received along like gangbusters,” mentioned Mr. Rice, 49. “So at the end of the evening, he said, ‘You need to come out and continue to be with me in Hearth Island. I consider you will like it.’”
The following summer season, Mr. Rice took Mr. Roth up on the give and discovered that he liked Mr. Roth’s getaway in the Pines extremely much indeed. But as he strolled along the boardwalk, it was a further household that commanded his interest: a large, pyramid-shaped building with cedar shingles on three sides and a soaring triangular wall of metal and glass on the fourth.
It was virtually as if a significant mock-up of I.M. Pei’s Louvre Pyramid had washed up on the seaside.
Intrigued, Mr. Rice began inquiring all around and learned that the dwelling was owned by Jeff Mahshie, a vogue and costume designer. So when Mr. Rice’s close friends encouraged him to ask for a tour, he barely hesitated right before strolling about.
Mr. Mahshie answered and welcomed him inside of — and Mr. Rice couldn’t imagine his eyes as he took in the sweeping watch over sand dunes to the ocean and the bay.
“We stroll in, and it is just unbelievable,” Mr. Rice stated.
The property was made by Julio Kaufman, an Argentine architect, in the early 1960s. Then in 2001, the writer Paul Rudnick purchased it and employed another architect, Hal Hayes, to update and extend it. It was Mr. Hayes who included the steel-and-glass wall, and who reconfigured the inside to make the prime level an open living-and-eating region with a kitchen and the lower degree an expansive major suite. Outdoors, Mr. Hayes extra a poolside guesthouse comprising three connected packing containers with pyramidal roofs.
Mr. Rice marveled at the compound, engaged Mr. Mahshie in discussion about scripts he spied on tables and lastly advised him that he was blessed to stay in these kinds of a spectacular home.
“And he explained, ‘Actually, I’m pondering of selling,’” Mr. Rice recalled.
Mr. Rice happened to be in the process of marketing his Harlem brownstone, which would give him with the resources to get the residence. Back again in Manhattan, a few days afterwards, “we met for lunch in TriBeCa and did a handshake offer,” Mr. Rice said, immediately after agreeing to a rate of $1.32 million.
“I just fell in like with the household and considered every little thing about it — including the course of action by which I was acquiring it — was amazing,” he said.
Following closing in December 2018, he required to furnish the dwelling, but he was ready for that, too: An aficionado of design, Mr. Rice runs a side small business referred to as Supervision, obtaining and marketing vintage midcentury-contemporary home furnishings and components. For the residing space, he brought in a pair of teak-and-cane sofas built by Peter Hvidt and Orla Mølgaard-Nielsen in the late 1950s, as well as a pair of slouchy armchairs with lacquered wooden frames and blue suede upholstery from the 1970s. For the primary suite, he put in a Norwegian Westnofa rosewood bed room established from the 1960s and classic French resin benches with multicolored geometric bases.
“Pretty a great deal everything is from all over the similar time period of time as the property,” Mr. Rice reported. “It’s my aesthetic anyway, but it turned out that I was picking matters that match.”
He opted not to make any significant architectural adjustments, but the home essential comprehensive repairs and updates, from changing rotten cedar boards outdoors to incorporating heat tape all-around pipes that would in any other case freeze in the winter season.
“Being on Fire Island, amongst the ocean and the bay, is truly tough on the properties,” he mentioned. “All the salt, the consistent humidity, et cetera. So every single 12 months I do a large venture. I did the electrical system and the plumbing program. This slide, it is likely to be the replacement of all the doorways and home windows.”
In all, Mr. Rice estimated that he has expended about $400,000 restoring and maintaining the household.
He has also flipped the script on possessing a summer season home, shelling out the the vast majority of the year on Fireplace Island and periodically returning to his condominium in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. When he is not residing in the pyramid, he rents it out on Airbnb and Vrbo, in which it can fetch extra than $3,000 a night in the summer season. “It is my key home,” he claimed, “but I do hire the dwelling out in the significant season to aid defray all of the ongoing expenditures.”
And if he misses a couple of scorching, sunny times in July and August, that’s Alright. “Looking by means of that window,” he explained, “no matter what the climate is — a storm, a snowstorm, a sunny working day or clouds heading by — is just wonderful.”
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