Natural Selection

Located off the south shore of Long Island, Fire Island is a summer dream, especially for New York City residents looking for a nearby ocean getaway. “Fire Island is one of those magical places that’s always managed to maintain its authenticity,” says interior designer Drew McGukinopens in a new tab, who has been going to the island for over 15 years. “You get on a ferry to a place where there are no cars, no dress code, no pretense, and no need to be fancy. It’s the exact opposite of the rest of my life.”

McGukin runs a busy design studio in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, so in 2014 when he saw a small, but well- located house in the Fire Island enclave known as The Pines, he bought it. “It probably needed to be renovated at that time, but I grabbed it, bought it, loved it, and lived in it for almost 10 years,” McGukin says. “However, when I was living there during the pandemic, I realized that the house had reached the end of its useful life.”

With his partner, David Durst, McGukin first looked at renovating the structure, but they quickly realized that the smarter option was to keep the home’s original footprint (which helped with zoning restrictions), but otherwise rebuild the house from scratch. McGukin had long admired local architect Scott Bromley’s modern cedar houses, which are very in keeping with the Fire Island houses designed by architects Horace Gifford and Harry Bates in the 1960s and ’70s. “The people who live here and love it have maintained a clean, direct, pure architectural language,” McGukin says. “It’s modern variations on the classic cedar box.”

Bromley designed an 1,800-square-foot cedar-clad house to meet the couple’s aesthetic and space requirements. While the entire house had to be raised to protect against storm surges and flooding, Bromley was still able to add a second floor and roof deck while keeping within the island’s height restrictions. The new second floor holds the primary bedroom suite, which freed up space for a small office and a powder room on the first floor.

What didn’t change was the open kitchen-living-dining space and the call-backs to the stylish touches found in the area’s other homes. “If you go into old Fire Island houses, there are so many built-in elements: day beds, window seats, side tables,” McGukin says. “We did as much of that integration as we could do.” He points out that in the kitchen, the cabinetry is an extension of the wall and continues in the same clear plank cedar. The stairway wall that leads to the primary bedroom curves at the top and becomes the headboard for the built-in bed and side tables.

The clean lines of the interior are accentuated by McGukin’s material choices. “I wanted honest materials. There’s wood, there’s Cambria, and there’s one blue fabric that I used for almost all the upholstery,” he explains, and adds with a laugh. “I keep saying this is me attempting to be a minimalist.” McGukin mixed and matched four variations of white Cambria quartz designs throughout the house: Inverness Frost, Snowdon White, Everleigh, and Salt Lake™*. And while he used the slabs in expected places like kitchen countertops, shower walls, and bathroom vanities, he also repeated the material in a few less expected places. “We needed a non-combustible material behind the gas burning stove; it became an interesting feature to use Cambria,” he says. “We also used it on the ledge behind the headboard in our bedroom.” He notes that in a summer house, he didn’t want to worry about a stray glass leaving rings.

While easy and durable are two words McGukin uses to describe the materials he used throughout the house, he credits his disciplined choices to the initial parameters he set for himself. “As my own client, whenever I was stumped on a decision, I just went back to my mission statement,” he says. “It was classic Pines, contemporary cedar box and honest materials. I tried to cut back and edit down, which was a wonderful experience for me.”