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Book review: 'Leisurama Now' by Paul Sahre

ARIELLA BUDICK

May 1, 2008

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In the early 1960s, you could walk into Macy's and pick up a beach house in Montauk for as little as $490 down. The homes were fully furnished, containing everything from furniture to flatware, towels to toothbrushes.

This was Leisurama, a utopian experiment in vacation homes for the masses, designed by Northport's own Andrew Geller, an architect at the firm of Raymond Loewy (New York, London, Paris). In a sense, the experiment failed: Only 187 homes were built of the 1,000 originally planned. But Leisurama lives on.

In a fun, fascinating new book illustrated with images as banal as they are strangely compelling, "Leisurama Now: The Beach House for Everyone" (Princeton Architectural Press, $40), Paul Sahre details the resort's history and how it changed.

In the summer of 1959, Nixon stood in one of the developer's model kitchens in Moscow and harangued Khrushchev on the virtues of capitalist choice in housewares. Leisurama's denizens have taken the lesson to heart: Over time, they've personalized the standard-issue homes, making each a study in self-expression.