And built in front of a wild A-frame called The Bomb!

You dream of splitting the big ol city with its two-million dollar shoebox apartments and acres of concrete and finding a piece of bucolic heaven, land cheap enough to get a spread where you can open a window and smell the ocean?

Three years ago, Daniel Serrano, a surfer and architect from San Sebastian in Spain, threw down $1500 on a Pastime Camper and hit the Pan-American Highway from Oregon, its beak pointed towards South America.

He found his little slice of surf-heaven in Aposentillo, Nicaragua, where a hard-breaking A-frame called The Boom breaks nine months of the year.

Serrano bought himself half-an-acre of dirt, parked his camper and built a traditional palm palapa shelter over it to stay dry during the raining season.

He figured he’d keep it as a “refuge” when he wasn’t back home in Spain, but with design work coming in, weeks turned into months and now he lives in Nicaragua for half the year.

And, so, that old Pastime Camper got turned into a 240-square foot modernist home.

“This cabin was built by two people using the most basic tools,” explains Serrano. “Through a system of sliding doors and windows that open with pulleys, the main space is able to open up to the landscape during the day and enclose to give privacy during the night. Interior and exterior distinctions are blurred allowing an engagement with the environment and at night it radiates like a lantern. The intention of the camper house is to explore the essentials for a magical holiday shelter within a small budget.”

Small budget?

Serrano says if you include the cost of the camper, buying and transporting materials, all his tools as well as cookware for the kitchen, so drive in jive away as they say, eight gees.

“I read books in the hammock on the terrace, do sunrise yoga, and eat well,” he tells Dwell, an architecture mag. “And score epic waves.”

Wild, yes?

The Crest Surf Club is gonna built its pool in Shirley, Long Island, a lil west of The Hamptons, projected completion date of summer 2024. 

Don’t y’wish advertising told it like it is? 

Anyone who’s gonna throw down thirty-five k on joining a wave pool country club in Long Island that’ll still cost you fifteen-hundred a month to surf, and that’s using tech so new the company supplying it only has a primitive landing page, well, don’t it suit perfectly the “man with a coy little phallus.”

New York City is the master of balancing the inclusion/exclusion axis, dangling fruits in front of its subjects that seem so tangible yet so outta reach.

From the DMV-sized lines outside Studio 54 in the ’70’s to the roped off entrances of Limelight and The Tunnel in the 90’s with their thick as brick bouncers and razor thin entrance judges, The City knows how to titillate. 

Sure, the oxidized lady in green at the harbor with the torch and crown will take you in if your tired and poor, but she ain’t gonna get ya reservations to Nobu on a Saturday at 7pm. 

Now, Long Island isn’t Manhattans little sister, if anything it’s its evil twin wrapped in suburban safety swag. The scalpelled noses are a little less sharp, but the attitude is more robust, swelled by property taxes that would give Donald Trump a nosebleed. 

The Crest Surf Club is gonna built its members-only joint in Shirley, Long Island, about 28 miles west of The Hamptons, with a projected completion date of summer 2024. 

The Crest website has a layout of what the pool and facility will look like, click here etc. But, like most things in NY, ya gotta submit a little piece of you (email inquiry) to get to the real guts. 

 

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Two days after the submission and a few follow up emails later, a Crest representative loosed the finer details.  

The entire facility covers 3.5 acres. The actual tank is 1.5 acres. Rides 85 yards long. Heated in the winter and open from five in the morn to midnight. Reserve your time slot, one-hour session, 10-20 waves per person, 8-12 peeps on the drink, or flies in the champagne, at a time. 

Like The American Dream wave pool who retained the services of big-waver Will Skuden to give their place street cred, Crest has given local pro Leif Engstrom their flag to wave at the bow of their ship.

Leif’s air game is tighter than a lit Roman candle and will give Crest legitimacy.   

Crest call ’emselves “the first and finest” wave pool country club but someone might wanna tell ’em about the Wiseman’s Surf Lodge, a seventy-five mill build an hour-and-a-half north of Sydney.

Same deal there, too, thirty or sixty gees to join, ongoing rates to surf and so on.