Sometimes, if the real estate gods smile upon you, all you need to secure your dream home is to be a dream dinner guest. At least that’s how it worked out for AD PRO Director designer Wesley Moon after he fell in love with this waterfront house in the Pines district of Fire Island, just off the coast of New York’s Long Island.
It didn’t hurt, of course, that he’s also a top-tier decorator, whose work had already earned the sellers’ admiration. Those owners had commissioned their postmodern-style house from architect Gary Stluka in the late 1980s, and then kept it in impeccable shape for nearly 40 years. But when it came time to sell, they couldn’t find a buyer who they trusted with their design-forward home’s future. Their neighbors, however, had someone in mind—their longtime friend Moon. And when the sellers met him over dinner, they immediately saw in the designer a steward, whose style and substance would serve the place well.
Moon, for his part, had recently sold a nearby oceanfront co-op with the intention to upsize. But after looking at “a million houses,” he hadn’t found anything—and he hadn’t initially considered this one because it was out of his price range. Over that fateful dinner, however, “we really hit it off,” Moon says. “The next day, they called and told me I could buy the house. I said, ‘Here’s all I can afford.’ And they said, ‘We’ll take it.’”
Moon was gobsmacked—not just by the sellers’ generosity, and their engaging mealtime repartee, but by their house too. “I felt like I could have built it myself,” he enthuses, pointing to especially appealing elements like the two-story-tall pickled-wood-paneled wall over the fireplace, the serene neutral color palette, the huge windows, and the soaring ceiling topped by a seamless pyramidal skylight. “It was beautifully detailed, architect built.”
