The glass face of the pyramid has uninterrupted views. The lower level has three bedrooms and an office, arrayed around a pool.
Photo: Daniel Rodriguez

The distinctive modernist homes that started going up on Fire Island in the 1960s became useful landmarks for visitors. There’s the TV House, Lincoln Center, and plenty of Horace Giffords, many of them visible from the beachfront or the shaded paths that run between lots. Then there’s the Pyramid House — one of the more uncommon silhouettes on Sail Walk, which appeared in 1960 and has been improved by a series of creative owners who have added guestrooms, a pool, and other luxuries. In 2018, the real-estate agent Glenn Rice was strolling on the beach and noticed the place. He knocked on the door, toured through, and worked out a handshake deal with the owner for a $1.325 million sale. Rice had a side hustle as a vintage dealer and brought in plenty of pieces from the same era, including 1950s sofas by Peter Hvidt and Orla Mølgaard-Nielsen, a pair of 1970s blue suede armchairs, and benches from France with colorful bases. Pricey summer rentals funded a renovation to add central air and upgrade the saltwater pool. But for the rest of the year, Rice simply lived there, working in an office off an 800-square-foot primary suite and taking dips in the pool or the ocean outside his door. “Working from home here is a joy,” he wrote in his rental listing, which offers the home for around $1,000 a night in the summer. The highlight: endless views through the glass wall on one side of the home’s main, pyramidal living space, which made the ocean feel so close he could sometimes spot whales.

The great room at sunrise.
Photo: Daniel Rodriguez

That view was the inspiration behind the pyramidal shape. As architect Julio Kaufman told a local reporter, the pyramid allowed a visitor to “stand in the middle of the living room and be able to look everywhere on the island.” He built the home in 1960, when the site extended back to the bay on the north, the ocean to the south, and the seashore that would soon become a national park to the east. Kaufman was a Jewish émigré from Buenos Aires who had clients in Manhattan and had been commissioned to build another house on the island for shoe designer Danny Berk. He would go on to design two more island landmarks — the Botel, a simple, unpretentious motel off the island’s yacht club, and The Co-ops, a development of 100 units connected by their zigzag roofline.

The home is at the western edge of the Fire Island National Seashore.
Photo: Daniel Rodriguez

His client for the Pyramid House was a great-nephew of J.P. Morgan’s from a branch of the family less focused on finance. John Goodwin’s relatives included artists, collectors, and an architect who helped design the Museum of Modern Art, and Goodwin wrote novels, children’s books, and short stories; his most famous was “The Cocoon,” a 1946 ghost story about a bug-obsessed boy. Friends included Christopher Isherwood, who describes “Johnny” Goodwin in diaries as skinny, blond, and handsome despite a nose that “turns up as though sniffing a chronically nasty smell.” As Isherwood recounted, Goodwin loved to throw lavish, raucous parties in his tastefully turned-out homes everywhere from Santa Monica to the Antilles, where guests included Isherwood’s ex, the model Billy Harris, along with Paul Cadmus and Tennesee Williams. When Goodwin wasn’t hosting, he was traveling through Africa and Asia and picking up pieces that “glowed” for him, as he told one curator.

A long line of stylish owners has adored Goodwin’s taste in architecture, expanding on the house’s basic form by adding luxuries. Kaufman’s design was eventually raised to add more bedroom space below and a wrap-around deck above. A major overhaul in the 2000s replaced the shingled wall of Kaufman’s original pyramid with an I.M. Pei–inspired wall of glass and steel and added two guest rooms with a shared bathroom between them on the other side of the lot — along with a new saltwater pool. Those three new rooms are linked, but from the exterior they look like three distinctive, ten-by-ten-foot homes, each capped with its own pyramidal roofline. The idea came from architect Hal Hayes, who was inspired by the Great Pyramid of Giza, where a pharaoh built a row of smaller pyramids alongside it for his queens, as Hayes told the Fire Island Pines Historical Society. His client, the writer Paul Rudnick, “loved the idea” in part because he had just written The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told — his 1998 retelling of the Bible. Rudnick sold the house in 2013 for just under $1 million to Jeff Mahshie, a Halston designer who started making clothes for Broadway, and won the Tony this year for Fallen Angels.

Three smaller pyramids hold two guest rooms on either side of a shared bathroom.
Photo: Daniel Rodriguez

Rice, who has owned the home for eight years, has floated the idea of selling before — asking $6.5 million in 2022. But he’s bringing the price down to $3.3 million, and broker Esteban Gomez says Rice has put “a meaningful amount” into the house over the past year, even glazing that immense triangle of a window — keeping the space cool and energy costs down. The pyramid might look a bit kooky from the outside, but inside it makes sense, Gomez says. “Instead of feeling like you’re sitting in a big box with windows, the sky actually becomes part of the room.”

The wall of glass was added in a 2006 renovation by the architect Hal Hayes.
Photo: Daniel Rodriguez

A dining table beneath the main window. Rice added new glazing and central air.
Photo: Daniel Rodriguez

The pyramid was renovated to become a single great room with a living area, dining space, and open kitchen.
Photo: Daniel Rodriguez

The kitchen in the great room.
Photo: Daniel Rodriguez

Stairs lead down from the main living space into the primary suite or down to the pool deck. From left: Photo: Daniel RodriguezPhoto: Daniel Rodriguez

Stairs lead down from the main living space into the primary suite or down to the pool deck. From top: Photo: Daniel RodriguezPhoto: Daniel Rodriguez

The primary suite is 800 square feet and has a view onto the dunes.
Photo: Daniel Rodriguez

At the other end, there’s a sitting area and steps which lead directly up to the pool.
Photo: Daniel Rodriguez

A screen slides closed, protecting views. Other perks include the working fireplace and built-in shelves.
Photo: Daniel Rodriguez

The primary bath has a rain shower. From left: Photo: Daniel RodriguezPhoto: Daniel Rodriguez

The primary bath has a rain shower. From top: Photo: Daniel RodriguezPhoto: Daniel Rodriguez

The sitting area off the primary suite leads up to the pool, which was added in the 2006 renovation for writer Paul Rudnick by architect Hal Hayes.
Photo: Daniel Rodriguez

Looking back at the main house from the pool.
Photo: Daniel Rodriguez

On the lower level of the main house, a den or home office looks over the pool.
Photo: Daniel Rodriguez

Across the pool, architect Hal Hayes added two more guest rooms and a bathroom that he envisioned as smaller pyramids fit for the “queens” of a pharaoh.
Photo: Daniel Rodriguez

The center of the three pyramidal out-buildings holds a shared bathroom, accessed by guest rooms on either side.
Photo: Daniel Rodriguez

The guest rooms take after the main house without directly copying the interiors. Each is an identical ten-by-ten foot miniature house.
Photo: Daniel Rodriguez

A view of the house at twilight.
Photo: Daniel Rodriguez

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