He Didn’t Plan to Buy a Place on Fire Island. But This Was No Ordinary Home.

Glenn Rice’s journey to owning a dwelling on Hearth Island, N.Y., commenced unexpectedly in Boston and was propelled, incredibly, by his like of theater.

In September 2017, Mr. Rice, a real estate agent, frequented Boston to see a mate execute in the opening night time of the enjoy “WARHOLCAPOTE.” At a evening meal afterward, he befriended Rob Roth, the playwright who wrote the demonstrate.

“We just started off speaking and obtained together like gangbusters,” claimed Mr. Rice, 49. “So at the close of the evening, he said, ‘You should really occur out and continue to be with me in Fire Island. I feel you will like it.’”

The up coming summer, Mr. Rice took Mr. Roth up on the offer and located that he preferred Mr. Roth’s getaway in the Pines extremely much indeed. But as he strolled together the boardwalk, it was an additional property that commanded his interest: a significant, pyramid-shaped making with cedar shingles on three sides and a soaring triangular wall of metal and glass on the fourth.

It was pretty much as if a huge mock-up of I.M. Pei’s Louvre Pyramid experienced washed up on the seashore.

Intrigued, Mr. Rice started asking around and learned that the residence was owned by Jeff Mahshie, a trend and costume designer. So when Mr. Rice’s close friends inspired him to ask for a tour, he hardly hesitated in advance of walking above.

Mr. Mahshie answered and welcomed him inside — and Mr. Rice couldn’t think his eyes as he took in the sweeping check out about sand dunes to the ocean and the bay.

“We wander in, and it’s just amazing,” Mr. Rice stated.

The house was built by Julio Kaufman, an Argentine architect, in the early 1960s. Then in 2001, the author Paul Rudnick acquired it and hired an additional architect, Hal Hayes, to update and develop it. It was Mr. Hayes who added the metal-and-glass wall, and who reconfigured the interior to make the prime amount an open residing-and-dining area with a kitchen and the decreased stage an expansive most important suite. Outside, Mr. Hayes additional a poolside guesthouse comprising 3 connected boxes with pyramidal roofs.

Mr. Rice marveled at the compound, engaged Mr. Mahshie in dialogue about scripts he spied on tables and eventually explained to him that he was lucky to are living in this sort of a amazing household.

“And he reported, ‘Actually, I’m wondering of promoting,’” Mr. Rice recalled.

Mr. Rice took place to be in the procedure of marketing his Harlem brownstone, which would present him with the resources to buy the home. Again in Manhattan, a number of days later on, “we achieved for lunch in TriBeCa and did a handshake offer,” Mr. Rice reported, just after agreeing to a selling price of $1.32 million.

“I just fell in adore with the home and assumed almost everything about it — such as the approach by which I was having it — was awesome,” he claimed.

Right after closing in December 2018, he required to furnish the residence, but he was well prepared for that, too: An aficionado of structure, Mr. Rice runs a side small business called Supervision, getting and providing classic midcentury-modern-day home furniture and add-ons. For the residing place, he introduced in a pair of teak-and-cane sofas made by Peter Hvidt and Orla Mølgaard-Nielsen in the late 1950s, in addition a pair of slouchy armchairs with lacquered wooden frames and blue suede upholstery from the 1970s. For the key suite, he installed a Norwegian Westnofa rosewood bed room established from the 1960s and classic French resin benches with multicolored geometric bases.

“Pretty a lot everything is from around the same time period as the property,” Mr. Rice mentioned. “It’s my aesthetic anyway, but it turned out that I was picking things that match.”

He opted not to make any large architectural alterations, but the home required intensive repairs and upgrades, from replacing rotten cedar boards outdoors to introducing warmth tape all around pipes that would in any other case freeze in the winter.

“Being on Hearth Island, amongst the ocean and the bay, is truly really hard on the properties,” he claimed. “All the salt, the frequent dampness, et cetera. So just about every calendar year I do a big project. I did the electrical process and the plumbing program. This fall, it’s heading to be the substitution of all the doors and home windows.”

In all, Mr. Rice approximated that he has invested about $400,000 restoring and sustaining the house.

He has also flipped the script on owning a summer time residence, paying out the the greater part of the year on Fireplace Island and periodically returning to his condominium in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. When he isn’t living in the pyramid, he rents it out on Airbnb and Vrbo, wherever it can fetch extra than $3,000 a night time in the summer months. “It is my principal residence,” he stated, “but I do rent the property out in the large time to aid defray all of the ongoing fees.”

And if he misses a handful of warm, sunny times in July and August, that is Okay. “Looking by way of that window,” he explained, “no make a difference what the temperature is — a storm, a snowstorm, a sunny day or clouds going by — is just superb.”

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