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

Glenn Rice’s journey to owning a residence on Fire Island, N.Y., began unexpectedly in Boston and was propelled, astonishingly, by his adore of theater.

In September 2017, Mr. Rice, a actual estate agent, frequented Boston to see a mate carry out in the opening night time of the perform “WARHOLCAPOTE.” At a supper afterward, he befriended Rob Roth, the playwright who wrote the demonstrate.

“We just begun speaking and received together like gangbusters,” explained Mr. Rice, 49. “So at the end of the evening, he explained, ‘You must come out and stay with me in Hearth Island. I assume you will like it.’”

The future summer, Mr. Rice took Mr. Roth up on the supply and observed that he favored Mr. Roth’s getaway in the Pines extremely a great deal without a doubt. But as he strolled along the boardwalk, it was one more property that commanded his awareness: a big, pyramid-formed building with cedar shingles on three sides and a soaring triangular wall of steel and glass on the fourth.

It was virtually as if a substantial mock-up of I.M. Pei’s Louvre Pyramid had washed up on the beach front.

Intrigued, Mr. Rice began inquiring about and figured out that the house was owned by Jeff Mahshie, a manner and costume designer. So when Mr. Rice’s mates inspired him to talk to for a tour, he barely hesitated just before going for walks above.

Mr. Mahshie answered and welcomed him within — and Mr. Rice couldn’t believe his eyes as he took in the sweeping watch above sand dunes to the ocean and the bay.

“We walk in, and it’s just extraordinary,” Mr. Rice said.

The home was created by Julio Kaufman, an Argentine architect, in the early 1960s. Then in 2001, the writer Paul Rudnick purchased it and hired another architect, Hal Hayes, to update and extend it. It was Mr. Hayes who included the steel-and-glass wall, and who reconfigured the interior to make the top degree an open up dwelling-and-eating place with a kitchen and the reduce level an expansive most important suite. Outside, Mr. Hayes additional a poolside guesthouse comprising a few linked boxes with pyramidal roofs.

Mr. Rice marveled at the compound, engaged Mr. Mahshie in discussion about scripts he spied on tables and lastly informed him that he was fortunate to are living in these types of a breathtaking house.

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

Mr. Rice took place to be in the method of advertising his Harlem brownstone, which would give him with the resources to acquire the dwelling. Back again in Manhattan, a couple days afterwards, “we fulfilled for lunch in TriBeCa and did a handshake deal,” Mr. Rice stated, just after agreeing to a rate of $1.32 million.

“I just fell in really like with the household and assumed almost everything about it — which include the procedure by which I was obtaining it — was amazing,” he reported.

Right after closing in December 2018, he wanted to furnish the property, but he was geared up for that, also: An aficionado of layout, Mr. Rice runs a aspect company known as Supervision, buying and providing vintage midcentury-modern-day home furniture and components. For the living home, he brought in a pair of teak-and-cane sofas created by Peter Hvidt and Orla Mølgaard-Nielsen in the late 1950s, plus a pair of slouchy armchairs with lacquered wood frames and blue suede upholstery from the 1970s. For the major suite, he set up a Norwegian Westnofa rosewood bedroom established from the 1960s and vintage French resin benches with multicolored geometric bases.

“Pretty much all the things is from all-around the similar time period of time as the property,” Mr. Rice claimed. “It’s my aesthetic anyway, but it turned out that I was picking issues that in shape.”

He opted not to make any huge architectural adjustments, but the house wanted considerable repairs and upgrades, from replacing rotten cedar boards outside to adding warmth tape around pipes that would if not freeze in the winter.

“Being on Fire Island, among the ocean and the bay, is really tough on the properties,” he explained. “All the salt, the continual humidity, et cetera. So every single yr I do a major undertaking. I did the electrical method and the plumbing process. This drop, it is going to be the substitute of all the doorways and home windows.”

In all, Mr. Rice believed that he has used about $400,000 restoring and sustaining the property.

He has also flipped the script on proudly owning a summertime residence, investing the the vast majority of the calendar year on Fire Island and periodically returning to his condominium in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. When he isn’t residing in the pyramid, he rents it out on Airbnb and Vrbo, where it can fetch far more than $3,000 a evening in the summer months. “It is my primary residence,” he reported, “but I do hire the property out in the large season to enable defray all of the ongoing costs.”

And if he misses a few scorching, sunny days in July and August, that’s Ok. “Looking as a result of that window,” he reported, “no make any difference what the weather is — a storm, a snowstorm, a sunny day or clouds going by — is just great.”

For weekly email updates on residential true estate news, sign up listed here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate.