CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/24/2025

'Fire Island Modernist,' expanded edition

Featured spreads are from the new, expanded edition of Fire Island Modernist: Horace Gifford and the Architecture of Seduction, updating Christopher Rawlins’ 2013 architecture classic with new houses, many additional photographs and a new Afterword by architect and Horace Gifford homeowner Charles Renfro. “Years before I purchased a modest Horace Gifford house in the Pines, I would cry every time I left the island,” Renfro writes. “They were tears of joy tinged with sadness and anxiety. Joy because I no doubt had an exhilarating and unscripted experience that I didn’t think was possible. Sadness because I didn’t know when I would feel so free and alive again (even if I was planning to come out the following weekend). And anxiety that all the living and loving that was packed into 48 hours wasn’t quite real. From the ferry, the sunset would dry the tears and bring me down to earth, forcing me to acknowledge that the Pines was indeed real, if completely unique.… As with modernism generally, Gifford’s houses were honest and simple. They were unadorned but elegant boxes that commune and conspire with nature, allowing the exterior setting to become the interior adornment. They enlisted nature as a theatrical partner: flowers come and go, leaves sprout and grow, tides rise and fall, all framed or revealed in the simple gestures of his houses. The beauty, the fragility, and even the hedonism of our lives is mirrored in the nature that surrounds our houses. With Gifford, we both become ourselves and become part of nature. We are validated in ways we could have never fathomed. Hence the tears.”