122A Ocean Walk

Fire Island Pines reads as a single experiment in modern houses on the dunes, and Horace Gifford was its defining architect. In 1965 he built this oceanfront house on Ocean Walk for the decorator Yale Burge, a pair of slender cedar towers set above the dunes and joined by an elevated bridge, the kind of light vertical structure that taught the Pines how to live between the bay and the Atlantic. Gifford designed dozens of houses here across the 1960s and 1970s, and the survivors are now treated as a body of work worth keeping.

The house did not stay still. Angelo Donghia, the decorator whose firm dressed rooms for a generation of clients, owned it next and had Gifford enlarge it in the early 1970s. Decades later the fashion designer Derek Lam took it on and brought in Neal Beckstedt, who radically expanded the house while keeping its logic of towers and glass: white cedar, black slate, and oversized panes turned to face the ocean, the rooms opening onto decks that step down toward the water.

What is offered now is that layered house, a Gifford original carried forward by Donghia and Beckstedt, with the beach a deck away. It is listed at 2,995,000 by Esteban Gomez of Compass, in Fire Island Pines. The vintage photograph in the gallery is Gifford's own record of the house in 1965, the cedar still new above the dunes.