TOP-HAT HOUSE

Justinian Kfoury is holding up the sawed-off end of a rusted pole. “This is literally what it was,” he says. It’s a Saturday in July, just after lunch, in the freshly restored Blum House on Water Island. The architect Roger Ferri first sketched the house in 1979 on a napkin. Construction began in 1982 and was completed two years later. The pole, meant to hold the house up from the center of the front, was fixed off by a couple of inches. “By 84, it was already leaking,” says Kfoury. “Already fucked.”

The house was commissioned by David Blum, a lawyer, and his wife, who enjoyed it well into the 21st century, even as the building was falling apart. “There were tarps flying in the wind upstairs,” says the artist Marc Hundley, who led its recent restoration. “But the Blums, who were in their 90s, would just sit out on the deck and look out on the ocean all summer.”

Water Island is a remote community of about 50 houses, located where the spit of Fire Island — a narrow strip of land off the coast of New York’s Long Island — becomes so thin that houses there boast views of both the bay and the Atlantic Ocean.

Kfoury, an agent for photographers, stylists, and artists, had already been a summer resident for over 20 years, buying and restoring the nearby Golde House in 2010. He had long admired the Blum house, which sits proudly overlooking the beach, affectionately nicknaming it the Top-Hat House. “It’s a postmodern folly, in a way,” he says. “It has this pagoda roof, these bullseye windows — it’s extravagant, but it doesn’t have hubris.”

The Blums sold the house to Kfoury in 2019, with the stipulation that it would be restored, not torn down. Kfoury and Hundley quickly realized its collapse was due to the rusted pole. “The doors were holding it up,” says Hundley. “The whole summer of 2020, we just came here every day, jacking it up a bit until it was level. Then we could start replacing the siding, taking the ceiling down, and taking the doors off. It took a long time.”

Hundley is a deft carpenter but had never contracted before. There are no vehicles on Water Island; materials could only be delivered by boat, weather permitting. Labor was scarce and often willful. “Taking the house apart was the worst,” says Hundley. The projected year-long restoration stretched to two and a half years.

The result is glorious: two open-plan rectangles, one atop the other. The upper floor is smaller, creating a balcony deck. Both floors are trimmed with a pagoda flourish, and flanked by four decorative Tuscan columns at the top. “It’s literally like two New York lofts,” says Kfoury, “a beach-house loft experience.” As much of the original structure as possible was preserved, including materials: the original cedar boards of the decking were just flipped.

Hundley repositioned the back-wall kitchen on the lower level, opening up its cubby-like ceiling, now trimmed with chunky dowels left over from a build he did for Nordstrom. The bathroom was moved out from under the stairs, now roofed by the glass from an old coffee table. Unnecessary closets are gone. “Anything stored here just gets moldy,” says Kfoury. “All you need is T-shirts, shorts, and a sweatshirt.”

Details are everything. An internal wood trim line that demarcated the height of the kitchen has been extended by Hundley, now going around the whole first floor. The five-inch red bullnose trim on the outside of the house was originally painted by Keith Gibbs, a decorator and former long-term Water Island resident. “We had a piece of the original,” says Hundley. “The red was almost this purple.” To get the color exactly right, they contacted Gibbs. “He was so tickled by us doing this,” says Kfoury.

Working with people like Gibbs is one of the reasons that Kfoury took on the Blum House in the first place: to mark and continue the legacy of the queer community that has always flourished in this part of Fire Island. In 1991, like so many of his contemporaries, Roger Ferri died from AIDS-related causes. He was 42 years old. While Hundley has added his own energy, insight, and artistry, the restoration of the Blum House honors Ferri’s vision. “It’s a masterpiece of (Post)modernity,” says Kfoury. “It’s perfection.”