Construction Diary: The Founder of a Cabin Rental Company Builds a Fire Island Retreat of His Own

Welcome to Beach Week, a celebration of the best place on earth.  

For Jon Staff and his partner, Michael Thornton, visiting Fire Island was "love at first sight."

On paper, Fire Island doesn’t seem like much: a wisp of land, less than nine miles square, in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Long Island, New York. But one trip to this barrier island and you’ll find that it’s not your typical beach escape. For starters, no cars are allowed; you have to take a ferry to get there, and the "roads" are well-worn wooden boardwalks.

Those elements certainly wooed Jon—founder of the cabin rental company, Getaway—and Michael, but it was the history of the place that stole their hearts. The town of Cherry Grove, where the couple recently built a house, is deeply, wholly, unapologetically queer—and it has been for a very long time.

The seaside escape started attracting an LGBTQ population in the 1940s, a time when being openly gay could be ostracizing and dangerous, not to mention illegal. But Cherry Grove, along with the neighboring Fire Island Pines, became an escape for the community, creating, as anthropologist Esther Newton deemed it, "America’s first gay and lesbian town."

After a few weekend trips over the course of a few years, Jon and Michael started casually looking at property. A few open houses led to some private showings, which led to the conclusion that while charming, most of the cedar cottages on Fire Island were old, dank, and dark—"a real contrast with the bright beach outside," recalls Jon.

They were ready to give up their "not-serious search" in summer 2019 when they saw one more ad in the window of the real estate office, this one for a buildable lot measuring 50 feet by 120 feet on the bay, with pilings from a house that was started, and abandoned, in 2008.

Here’s how they turned this postage stamp of land into a haven for friends and family.

Finding the Land

Jon: We were about to leave on the ferry, but decided we might as well walk by this piece of land because we had some time to kill.

Michael: We walked by it a couple of times because it was completely covered with phragmites [an invasive species of reed] that were probably 10 feet tall, just a wall of them between the two neighboring bungalows. The pilings were here, but you couldn’t see them at all.

Jon: We’d just come off of these musty open houses, so it felt exciting to think about dreaming something up. We closed on the lot in February 2020.

Starting the Process

Jon: We inherited the plans and permits for the house. We didn’t care for the design, but the assumption we made was that if we kept the footprint the same, it would make things easier. It turns out we could have changed a lot more, because the updates we made triggered so many reviews. But architects and designers talk a lot about "enabling constraints," so this was a fixed variable from which to start.

Finding an Architect

Jon: We knew this was a stretch to take on, financially and logistically. We thought that maybe we could work with some student architects or an up-and-comer, so I called [Kansas City–based architect] Matthew Hufft, who I’m in a business group with, to get his advice. Instead, he said, "I’d love to work with you on it," which surprised us because he works on much bigger projects.