When Lori and Joel Kaplan bought their house on Long Beach Island, they didn’t need to think up a name for the place, like Dunescape or Sea Breeze. It already had one: the Chicken Bucket House.
Perched right on the boulevard, L.B.I.’s main thoroughfare, the home is a riot of slants and curves. Chief among them is the tilted cylindrical room jutting out over the front door — a potentially controversial detail, given that it looks like a supersized order of KFC, or like Oscar the Grouch might pop out.
“‘We can get rid of the bucket if you want,’” Ms. Kaplan recalled an architect telling her before drawing up renovation plans, after the couple bought the house in 2013. Her answer: No way.
“It’s the Bucket House!” she said. “That’s what makes it unique!”
The Kaplans’ home is hardly the only landmark on the quiet, upscale north end of this barrier island off the New Jersey coast, which has flaunted boundary-pushing home designs for almost a century. The Loveladies neighborhood in particular, with its larger lots and higher prices, has long been L.B.I.’s crucible of experimentation. Its beachfront is dotted with a kaleidoscopic mix of cedar-shingled contemporaries, outlandish geometric confections, and works of out-and-out modernism.
“There are three places on the entire East Coast with a tradition of modern architecture,” said local architect Stephen Midouhas, who designed his first modern home on L.B.I. in 1976. “Cape Cod because of Harvard, the Hamptons because of money, and Long Beach Island.”
On a barrier island, though, nothing is permanent.
Decades after a collision of economic, cultural and meteorological forces created the ideal conditions for adventurous architecture, those same forces are now pulling the pendulum back toward a more conservative style. A wave of new construction — bigger-than-ever homes, many built in the same gambrel-roofed, Dutch-colonial style — is flattening Loveladies’s signature variety and threatening its future as one of nation’s densest collections of modernist and eclectic homes.
“Is it a Hamptons thing?” wondered Dana Diorio-Clayton, a second-generation L.B.I. broker, invoking the ultimate insult on this laid-back barrier island. “It does not scream L.B.I. to me. It doesn’t even whisper it.”
The island’s modernist history traces back to the 1930s, when the north end was home to a fledgling artist colony. An arts foundation, founded in Loveladies in 1948 by a Rodin-trained sculptor, further incubated the modernist current. So did Loveladies Harbor, a planned community of modern houses masterminded by a pair of Soviet-spies-turned-real-estate-developers in the 1950s.
Then came the storm. The nor’easter of 1962 leveled much of the island, creating a blank canvas for architects just as the Garden State Parkway was opening the shore to new visitors and new development. A cohort of renowned architects rushed in. Malcolm Wells gave Loveladies the Pyramid House. Richard Saul Wurman, a protégé of Louis Kahn, contributed his funky, cylindrical Sand Castles. And Robert Venturi built the Pop Art-inspired Lieb House (which was eventually floated on a barge to Glen Cove, N.Y., in 2009, to dodge the wrecking ball).
In 1980, a young architect named Gym Wilson walked up to an empty oceanfront lot with a beach chair and a sketch pad. He’d been hired by a Pennsylvania couple to design a summer home that emphasized outdoor living and maximized views and breezes.
“It was wide open,” Mr. Wilson said recently of the vast expanse of undeveloped dunes. “What a great place for architects to go.” The home he created, an angular, cedar-shingled contemporary with crimson-colored fiberglass “bleachers” doubling as a roof, went on to win a statewide architecture prize in 1982.
A Jersey Shore native, Mr. Wilson had “floated down” to L.B.I. in the 1970s with a design sensibility shaped by pioneers like Frank Lloyd Wright (his “guiding light”) and Hamptons modernist Norman Jaffe. When Gym Wilson Architects put up its first shingle in 1978, he was at the dawn of a new era for architecture on L.B.I.
As the 1980s construction boom hit, there were still only two architecture firms on the island: Mr. Wilson’s and a rival office led by another local, Oram Tonge. A decade later, their former interns would take the baton. Mr. Tonge’s firm begot Studio Tagland, responsible for madcap designs like the Chicken Bucket. Mr. Wilson’s early hires, Michael Ryan and Mr. Midouhas, became L.B.I.’s pre-eminent modernists, racking up architectural awards.
They soon found themselves building on top of their own work. In the 1990s, Mr. Ryan was hired to expand Mr. Wilson’s prizewinning Bleachers House, and designed an expansive round room addition — only to be hired again a few years later to design an entirely new house on the very same site. The new owners, willing to give up conveniences like a garage for their architect’s vision, wound up with a bright red box that hovers 11 feet above the sand.
Built in 2001, the award-winning home, which appears to float over the dunes, looks like nothing else on the island. But it’s now shadowed by an enormous new shingle-style compound next door. The two houses offer competing visions for the future of L.B.I.
And the writing seems to be on the wall: The red house just sold, too.
“Buying or building a Mike Ryan house is like buying a sculpture,” said Joy Luedtke, an L.B.I. broker who sold the house in 2024 for $6.75 million.
Increasingly, though, her clients have other priorities, namely a laundry list of amenities. Since the pandemic, buyers want annexes that can fit their extended families, and homes are seeing more year-round use. “An elevator is a must,” Ms. Luedtke said. “A pool is a must. An outdoor backyard Shangri-La is a must.”
A short bike ride from the Chicken Bucket House, another zany home, alternately nicknamed the Crooked House and the Leaning Tower of Loveladies, used to lean precariously over the boulevard like a melting sand castle. Designed by Studio Tagland, it was sold in 2017 and replaced by a sprawling spec house with the Hamptons-style gambrel-roof look.
The compound embodies the latest L.B.I. homebuilding trend: a massive increase in scale, in this case from 2,900 square feet to 7,000, and from zero pools to two. And while the tendency on L.B.I. has always been for bigger homes, the style, scale and speed of development over the past decade has felt different.
“Since Sandy, it’s been at a breakneck pace,” said local architect Jay Madden, another of Gym Wilson’s original hires. The 2012 hurricane walloped the island, igniting a 1962-like surge in construction. Experimentation was no longer the goal, and increasingly, the Nantucket-shingle style that blankets the Hamptons and Cape Cod took over.
“Modern goes in and out of style,” said Michael Ziman, a prolific high-end developer on the north end. “As prices are going up, people want to protect their investment. They don’t want to step too far outside the box.” (The island’s average sale price last year was nearly $2.5 million, up more than 250 percent since 2014.)
Developers also have to be able to sell the properties they build. “If a developer is going to build a spec house, he isn’t going to hire me or Steve Midouhas,” said Sam Gordon, who’s been designing modernist homes on L.B.I. since the 1990s. “It’s got to have mass-market appeal.”
That appeal tends to exclude the island’s more inventive architects. Mr. Ryan lamented that everything today has to be “maxed out,” writing off these colossal new constructions as “piles of house.”
For Adrian and Christine Aery, who wanted to remodel their 1970 Loveladies home “to make it big enough for the grandkids,” Mr. Aery said, the project came down to one factor: cost.
“We would have loved to have gone modern 20 years ago,” Ms. Aery said. “But the price was exorbitantly higher.” Instead, they hired a builder to put up a more traditional house in its place.
Losing more modern homes on the north end, particularly the historic midcentury holdouts, is a sobering thought for architecture fans. “When you lose them, you lose a huge piece of humanity and innovation,” said Daniella Kerner, executive director of the L.B.I. Foundation, an arts and community center that nurtured the area’s earliest experimentation.
“Architecture adds so much value to a community,” Ms. Kerner said. “It’s not about how many TVs or bathrooms you can stuff into one house.”
But the erasure of modern architecture on L.B.I. is far from a fait accompli. Mr. Midouhas — whom Mr. Madden said “torches himself, leaves blood on the drawings, to make a true artistic statement” — just broke ground on his biggest project in 50 years — his first on the oceanfront in Loveladies. As for the neighborhood’s existing modern homes, their fate rests in the hands of their future owners.
One afternoon last fall, Mr. Ryan, recently retired, was walking the beach in Loveladies. As he approached the recently sold red house — perhaps his masterwork — he braced himself for signs of an impending demolition. But he was surprised to see workmen carefully touching up the red paint. The new owners had decided to keep the house.
“They’re restoring it,” he told his wife later that day. “It looks great.”