Life's a beach.
For the height of summer, we’re recommending four books built for the beach bag—spanning dune houses, kite collecting, island living, and the sand beneath it all. Playful and a little obsessive, each one finds good design (and a good story) hiding between the towels and sunscreen.
Fire Island Modernist: Horace Gifford and the Architecture of Seduction
by Christopher Bascom Rawlins
Metropolis Books, 2025
Long before Summer House turned the Hamptons into content, architect Horace Gifford was quietly building something better on Fire Island: modest cedar-and-glass beach houses, wedded to their sites, with diagonal siding and double-height ceilings built for post-Stonewall liberation. This expanded edition adds four newly featured houses and a new afterword by architect Charles Renfro, filling out the record of the era's self-described “gay paradise.”
The Summer Book
by Tove Jansson
NYRB Classics, 2008
A tiny island in the Gulf of Finland holds worlds within worlds in this short novel by the creator of the Moomins. Sophia, six, and her wry, unsentimental grandmother spend a summer undertaking unremarkable pursuits—building a boat from bark, pitching a tent, cataloging bugs—and somehow arrive at what life is actually about. Like summer itself, it comes to an end too soon.
Mr. Goodman: The Kiteman
by Emily King
Kite Club, 2026
“Principles of kite design have traveled across cultures over the course of millennia, following the flow of knowledge and trade,” notes designer Bertjan Pot in one of the essays accompanying this exhaustively illustrated survey of Malcolm Goodman's collection—500 kites gathered from more than fifty countries, from hand-painted Japanese kites by artisans recognized as Living National Treasures to centuries-old fighting kites built for combat. It's less a book about kites than about how far a good idea can travel. So go fly one.
The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization
by Vince Beiser
Riverhead Books, 2018
A provocation for every designer working in glass, concrete, or silicon — which is to say, nearly all of them. After water and air, sand is the resource we consume most, quietly poured into every building, chip, and screen we interact with. Beiser traces the ubiquitous material from the pyramids to the iPhone, and then follows the black-market "sand mafias" profiting off coastlines and reefs. You’ll never look a beach the same way.
Throws down and stacks up.
The Chuck Norris of chairs. Our Decade Lounge Chair always has your back. Made using 100% recycled plastic, it’s durable enough to suit every space and season. Deceptively simple design is comfortable, stackable and beautiful, whether in your parlor, on the patio or at your preferred purlieu. Nifty drain hole keeps the seat (and your skivvies) dry.
