No matter how swanky the houses in the third iteration of Gestalten’s addictively voyeuristic Surf Shacks series, you know there’s sand on the floor—maybe not in the luscious pictures, but just before or after. What distinguishes these forty homes, from Leucadia to Ericeira to the North Shore, is that their style grew from the inside out. No designer imposing a concept—just bare wood and weathered boards, maritime trinkets, shelves of dog-eared surf books, art from friends next to kids’ drawings, nooks that accumulated rather than were styled. Matt Titone’s subjects—artists, shapers, photographers, pros, shop owners, watermen—have built homes that are extensions of the lives they’ve chosen, not stages for them. The real story, he writes, “is what happens in the spaces between swells.”
