A game of Twister is ready to play on the portico of Carl Fisher’s 1920s Dutch Colonial mansion on the edge of Montauk, now part of the Montauk Historical Society’s collection of museums. Blueprint-patterned curtains open to an installation that is not your standard architectural exhibition of text placards and photographs or drawings on a wall, but a full-scale interior of a 1960s Leisurama house.

The formal living room of Fisher House with its arched windows and stone fireplace is concealed by faux wood wall paneling to recreate the interior of a Leisurama beach house, with each “room” delineated by furniture appropriate to its function. The spaces are outfitted in modernist summer decor: A bright green bedspread is strewn with a Mary Quant dress owned by architectural historian Helen Searing; a kitchen is set with period food boxes—Wonder Bread, Jell-o, and more. A dining room table is set for six with olive green and blue patterned Melmac plates below a metal wall sculpture —all too familiar to anyone around in the mid 1960s.

Leisurama homes were designed in the early 1960s as prefabricated structures for a 7,500-square-foot plot, sold complete with furniture and furnishings through Macy’s. The furniture was designed by Raymond Loewy and William Snaith Inc. and Andrew Geller was the architect. A Leisurama house was a step beyond the mobile home, or the beach bungalow; more like a modernist beachside version of a Leavittown house. The precursor to the Leisurama prefabricated house was Geller’s “Typical American House” model which gained renown as the stage set of the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow where Richard Nixon and Khrushchev held their Kitchen Debate. Still extant and studied by those such as Paul Sahre in the book Leisurama Now: The Beach House for Everyone (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), Leisurama house owners on Culloden Shores in Montauk, where over 200 were built between 1963 and 1965, have been altering them to suit their needs.

Fortunately, one intact interior was donated to the historical society and its director Mia Certic thought it could be a perfect summer installation. With a crew of stage and design specialists Certic transformed the space into an experiential exhibition. The mustard yellow living room couch, ceramic table lights, coffee table, games and toys, create a time warp. As visitors gathered around a black-and-white faux wood boxed television they could be heard singing along with the Gilligan’s Island theme song and the Mr. Clean jingle.

The window installations are particularly well designed with lighting that simulates the sun and props such as lawn chairs and surfboards. Additionally, the historical society has created a timeline of the period and a shop for visitors to buy T-shirts and 60s memorabilia from the Beatles to plastic flowers.

Interviews with residents heard through princess telephones and loops of home movies emphasize the freedom and the cooler air at the seaside. Like the modern houses in Wellfleet, Cape Cod, where the only summer necessity was sun and sand, a bathing suit and a beach towel, this installation recalls perhaps a “simpler” modern life that is disappearing beneath our footprints today.

— Nina Rappaport, Vice President, DOCOMOMO US/NY Tri-State

Through September 2
Montauk Historical Society
Carl Fisher House, 44 Foxboro Road, Montauk

Leisurama Exhibition!

more on the exhibition:

At the Carl Fisher House, 1960s Montauk Is Alive and Well