They Were About to Move In When the Ocean Almost Washed Away Their New Home
Gail and Ron Fink’s property in Jupiter Inlet Colony sustained major damage during an unusually windy day. ‘The whole backyard is shot. All the landscaping is gone.’
8 min
Gail and Ron Fink weren’t home the day the ocean swallowed their backyard.
The Florida couple, who are in their 70s, were a few miles away on Feb. 6—an unusually blustery day in the Sunshine State—as waves pounded their beachfront property in Jupiter Inlet Colony, sweeping sand, dirt and trees out to sea. When it was all over, the Finks’ newly-built, roughly 10,000-square-foot home was intact; so too was their free-form swimming pool, improbably balanced on exposed concrete-and-steel pilings.
“That’s what saved the whole thing,” said Ron, founder of an air- and-water purification company. “The pilings are holding up the house and pool.”
Drone footage and pictures from local photographers and the Finks’ builder show the severity of the destruction, which left their pool suspended in the air, with pipes protruding from the earth. Town officials said erosion claimed 7 to 10 feet of sand and created steep drop-offs in front of about half-dozen homes, including one belonging to Kid Rock , the rapper-turned-country rocker, who paid $3.2 million for the property in 2012. Conair heiress Babe Rizzuto also sustained damage to her property down the street, which she bought for $6.3 million in 2015 and currently has listed for $22.5 million, according to Zillow. Neither responded to requests for comment.
But the Finks house, located just past the end of a granite revetment wall—a kind of sea wall—bore the brunt of the heavy wind and waves.
“The whole backyard is shot. All the landscaping is gone,” said Ron. Also gone are fully matured Palm trees and an ipe-wood deck. “It’s out floating in the ocean someplace.” Ron is self-insured and the repair work will be quite expensive. undefined
A New Jersey native, Ron is an engineer by training who worked at nuclear-testing sites in California and Nevada before moving to Florida in the 1980s. He is the founder of RGF Environmental Group, which makes air- water-and food-purification systems.
For almost 40 years, the Finks—who have three adult children and eight grandchildren—have lived in Admirals Cove, a gated community in Jupiter about 5 miles from their new house. They paid $180,000 for the Admirals Cove lot in 1987 and built a roughly 6,000-square-foot house, Ron said. The Finks also own homes in the Cayman Islands and Bahamas.
Ron said they began looking for property in Jupiter Inlet Cove years ago. “It’s a neat place, just a closed little colony right on the ocean, low key and quiet,” he said.
About 20 miles north of Palm Beach, Jupiter Inlet Colony is at the southern tip of Jupiter Island. The town, founded around 1959, has approximately 240 homes and is surrounded on three sides by water—the Atlantic Ocean, Jupiter Inlet and the Intracoastal Waterway. Long a destination for wealthy homeowners, homes in Jupiter Inlet Colony tend to trade for between $2 million and $5 million, although one sold for $18.6 million in January, according to real-estate brokerage Redfin. Last year, a home on the Intracoastal sold for $21.4 million, a record for the town.
In 2020, the Finks paid $4.9 million for a vacant beachfront lot and subsequently built a coastal-style house with a copper-and shake-style roof, covered loggia, pool and outdoor fire pit. “You know, it’s kind of a dream home,” Ron said. “We have built quite a few homes, but this is the end of the line for us, hopefully the last one.”
He said the property originally belonged to the singer Perry Como, one of the town’s first residents. A prior owner demolished Como’s house, and when the Finks bought it, there were concrete-and-steel pilings sticking out of the ground.
Ron Fink said he never removed about 60 pilings, he simply added roughly 30 more. “Now I’m glad I did,” he said. (Pilings are based on the design of a house, so Ron retained some pilings that he didn’t necessarily need.)
John Melhorn of design-build firm Thomas Melhorn, which built the house, said the Finks were a final review away from obtaining a certificate of occupancy when the backyard was destroyed. “They were right there at the goal line,” he said.
Melhorn said the erosion began in late October amid unusually high winds and ocean swell. During the first week of February, sand beneath a row of sea grapes that stabilized the dunes between the house and ocean began to wash away. By the evening of Feb. 6, the plantings disappeared. The yard was gone by the next morning.
Melhorn said a pre-existing, low wall between the ocean and house—described as a cinder-block retaining wall on land surveys—also washed away, as did a walkway and steps to the beach. But he said the 2-foot-high wall was less of a retaining wall and more like a curb between the street and sidewalk. In this case, a prior owner used it to hold sea grapes back from encroaching on the property. The Finks replaced the wall with decorative stone, now lost to the ocean. An outdoor fire pit is still there, cantilevered over the ocean. “We tried to pull as many things out as we saw the erosion coming, but we lost a lot,” Melhorn said.
In Florida, erosion is increasing because of more frequent, more severe storms and sea-level rise, said Cheryl Hapke, a research professor at the University of South Florida and the chair of the Florida Coastal Mapping Program. But she said it isn’t just hurricane-level storms that cause major damage. “One thing I have found about barrier islands [like Jupiter Inlet Colony] is that sometimes a series of smaller events can have as big an impact as a major hurricane,” she said. “But people get caught off guard. It’s something they don’t think of.”
In Jupiter Inlet Colony, longtime residents said this month’s erosion is the worst the area has seen in years, possibly ever.
Mayor Ed Hocevar, who has lived there for 17 years, said it has been a particularly cool and challenging winter with an abnormal number of Nor’easters. On Feb. 6, local news channels warned of high winds, with gusts between 40 and 50 miles an hour. (There were also reports of an earthquake off the coast that week, causing high waves.)
Since the 1980s, Jupiter Inlet Colony has had a granite rock revetment wall that extends from the northern end of the community past 11 oceanfront homes. “But we’ve got 28 homes along the beachfront, so it isn’t complete,” Hocevar said. “Where the wall ended is where the significant damage occurred.” Hocevar said he doesn’t know why the wall wasn’t completed, although local lore is that homeowners building the wall ran out of money.
Last week, the town hired a local mining company to bring in 7,000 tons of sand to replace what washed away. Hocevar said it would cost about $500,000, which will come out of the town’s reserve fund. Long term, he said, extending the revetment wall isn’t a strong possibility.
Hapke, the coastal geology expert, said that in recent decades, sea walls and hardened structures have fallen out of favor as scientists discovered they are detrimental to the environment around them. “Storm water wants to flow, so it will redirect water to the area without a sea wall,” she said, adding that the most ideal long-term solution is to move homes away from the coastline.
Hocevar, 67, who has been mayor of Jupiter Inlet Colony for about a month, said the town is working closely with the Department of Environmental Protection on its response. He said the DEP’s recommendation, should erosion like this occur again, is to bring in more sand. Hocevar emphasised that the community is rallying together. “Think about it as a fortress and your wall has been breached,” he said. “You want to protect your neighbourhood and that’s what we’re trying to do here.”
Holly Meyer Lucas of Compass, who represented the seller when the Finks purchased their property, said Jupiter Inlet Colony is a “special little enclave” where sales exploded during Covid. “Listings sell after a day or sell off-market,” she said.
Lucas said the consensus among local real-estate agents is that property values will hold, despite the erosion. “I think this is a really rare, weird, fluky event,” she said. “I’ve sold everywhere up and down the coast and I’ve never heard of anything like this.”
Babe Rizzuto, whose house is two doors down from the Finks, listed her house for $24.5 million in December 2023 and cut the price to $22.5 million on Feb. 6, according to Zillow.
“She’s going to continue to sell,” said Milla Russo of Illustrated Properties, who is marketing the property with her husband, Andrew Russo. “Even though the timing isn’t great, it is what it is.”
Russo said there has been erosion in the past, and during hurricanes residents of Jupiter Inlet Colony are the first in the area to evacuate. But in general, people are not preoccupied with the weather. “Maybe because we live here, when the hurricanes come, we all have hurricane parties. We go to people’s homes and we barbecue and grill. Of course we’re careful and we lock up and all that, but weather is weather,” she said. “We’ve never been terribly scared.”
(The Russos were also involved in selling the Fink property. However, in 2020 the closing agent on the deal, Florida-based Eavenson, Fraser & Lunsford, PLLC, sued Milla Russo and Illustrated Properties as part of a commission dispute. The seller, Michael Cantor’s Range Road Developers, was named as a defendant and cross-plaintiff in the suit, in which a judge ruled in favor of Eavenson, court records show. Milla Russo declined to comment on the suit. Eavenson declined to comment beyond the judge’s findings and Cantor did not respond to requests for comment.)
Ron was also matter-of-fact about the state of beachfront living. Bring a life jacket, he jokingly told a photographer who inquired last week about taking his picture.
However, the Finks are facing weeks of costly repairs. Although the town is bringing in sand to replace the decimated beachfront, the couple is self-insured and will be on the hook for the cost of rebuilding. Several major home insurers have pulled out of Florida, and Ron said insurance on the house would have cost $100,000 a year. Now, he estimated they could face about $1 million worth of repair work. “We gotta eat it,” he said.
The couple, who was supposed to move into the house this month, has put those plans on hold—for now. An engineer recently inspected the property and deemed the house safe, Ron said. “We’re doing wallpaper today,” he said. “We can put it back together again.” The patio and pool area, meanwhile, are roped off while the area underneath is backfilled with sand.
Ron said being near the ocean makes it worthwhile. “I just love the ocean, we both do. It’s important to us,” he said. “It isn’t easy to look at, but I’ve been through a lot worse.”
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Weary of ‘smart’ everything, Americans are craving stylish ‘analog rooms’ free of digital distractions—and designers are making them a growing trend.
5 min
James and Ellen Patterson are hardly Luddites. But the couple, who both work in tech, made an unexpectedly old-timey decision during the renovation of their 1928 Washington, D.C., home last year.
The Pattersons had planned to use a spacious unfinished basement room to store James’s music equipment, but noticed that their children, all under age 21, kept disappearing down there to entertain themselves for hours without the aid of tablets or TVs.
Inspired, the duo brought a new directive to their design team.
The subterranean space would become an “analog room”: a studiously screen-free zone where the family could play board games together, practice instruments, listen to records or just lounge about lazily, undistracted by devices.
For decades, we’ve celebrated the rise of the “smart home”—knobless, switchless, effortless and entirely orchestrated via apps.
But evidence suggests that screen-free “dumb” spaces might be poised for a comeback.
Many smart-home features are losing their luster as they raise concerns about surveillance and, frankly, just don’t function.
New York designer Christine Gachot said she’d never have to work again “if I had a dollar for every time I had a client tell me ‘my smart music system keeps dropping off’ or ‘I can’t log in.’ ”
Google searches for “how to reduce screen time” reached an all-time high in 2025. In the past four years on TikTok, videos tagged #AnalogLife—cataloging users’ embrace of old technology, physical media and low-tech lifestyles—received over 76 million views.
And last month, Architectural Digest reported on nostalgia for old-school tech : “landline in hand, cord twirled around finger.”
Catherine Price, author of “ How to Break Up With Your Phone,” calls the trend heartening.
“People are waking up to the idea that screens are getting in the way of real life interactions and taking steps through design choices to create an alternative, places where people can be fully present,” said Price, whose new book “ The Amazing Generation ,” co-written with Jonathan Haidt, counsels tweens and kids on fun ways to escape screens.
From both a user and design perspective, the Pattersons consider their analog room a success.
Freed from the need to accommodate an oversize television or stuff walls with miles of wiring, their design team—BarnesVanze Architects and designer Colman Riddell—could get more creative, dividing the space into discrete music and game zones.
Ellen’s octogenarian parents, who live nearby, often swing by for a round or two of the Stock Market Game, an eBay-sourced relic from Ellen’s childhood that requires calculations with pen and paper.
In the music area, James’s collection of retro Fender and Gibson guitars adorn walls slicked with Farrow & Ball’s Card Room Green , while the ceiling is papered with a pattern that mimics the organic texture of vintage Fender tweed.
A trio of collectible amps cluster behind a standing mic—forming a de facto stage where family and friends perform on karaoke nights. Built-in cabinets display a Rega turntable and the couple’s vinyl record collection.
“Playing a game with family or doing your own little impromptu karaoke is just so much more joyful than getting on your phone and scrolling for 45 minutes,” said James.
Screen-Free ‘Escapes’
“Dumb” design will likely continue to gather steam, said Hans Lorei, a designer in Nashville, Tenn., as people increasingly treat their homes “less as spaces to optimise and more as spaces to retreat.”
Case in point: The top-floor nook that designer Jeanne Hayes of Camden Grace Interiors carved out in her Connecticut home as an “offline-office” space.
Her desk? A periwinkle beanbag chair paired with an ottoman by Jaxx. “I hunker down here when I need to escape distractions from the outside world,” she explained.
“Sometimes I’m scheming designs for a project while listening to vinyl, other times I’m reading the newspaper in solitude. When I’m in here without screens, I feel more peaceful and more productive at the same time—two things that rarely go hand in hand.”
A subtle archway marks the transition into designer Zoë Feldman’s Washington, D.C., rosy sunroom—a serene space she conceived as a respite from the digital demands of everyday life.
Used for reading and quiet conversation, it “reinforces how restorative it can be to be physically present in a room without constant input,” the designer said.
Laura Lubin, owner of Nashville-based Ellerslie Interiors, transformed a tiny guest bedroom in her family’s cottage into her own “wellness room,” where she retreats for sound baths, massages and reflection.
“Without screens, the room immediately shifts your nervous system. You’re not multitasking or consuming, you’re just present,” said Lubin.
As a designer, she’s fielding requests from clients for similar spaces that support mental health and rest, she said.
“People are overstimulated and overscheduled,” she explained. “Homes are no longer just places to live—they’re expected to actively support well-being.”
Designer Molly Torres Portnof of New York’s DATE Interiors adopted the same brief when she designed a music room for her husband, owner of the labels Greenway Records and Levitation, in their Lido Beach, N.Y. home. He goes there nightly to listen to records or play his guitar.
The game closet from the townhouse in “The Royal Tenenbaums”? That idea is back too, says Gachot. Last year she designed an epic game room backed by a rock climbing wall for a young family in Montana.
When you’re watching a show or on your phone, “it’s a solo experience for the most part,” the designer said. “The family really wanted to encourage everybody to do things together.”
Analog Accessories
Don’t have the space—or the budget—to kit out an entire retro rec room?
“There are a lot of small tweaks you can make even if you don’t have the time, energy or budget to design a fully analog room from scratch,” said Price.
Gachot says “the small things in people’s lives are cues of what the bigger trends are.”
More of her clients, she’s noticed, have been requesting retrograde staples, such as analog clocks and magazine racks.
For her Los Angeles living room, chef Sara Kramer sourced a vintage piano from Craigslist to be the room’s centerpiece, rather than sacrifice its design to the dominant black box of a smart TV. Alabama designer Lauren Conner recently worked with a client who bought a home with a rotary phone.
Rather than rip it out, she decided to keep it up and running, adding a silver receiver cover embellished with her grandmother’s initials.
Some throwback accessories aren’t so subtle. Melia Marden was browsing listings from the Public Sale Auction House in Hudson, N.Y. when she spotted a phone booth from Bell Systems circa the late 1950s and successfully bid on it for a few hundred dollars.
“It was a pandemic impulse buy,” said Marden.
In 2023, she and her husband, Frank Sisti Jr., began working with designer Elliot Meier and contractor ReidBuild to integrate the booth into what had been a hallway linen closet in their Brooklyn townhouse.
Canadian supplier Old Phone Works refurbished the phone and sold them the pulse-to-tone converter that translates the rotary dial to a modern phone line.
The couple had collected a vintage whimsical animal-adorned wallpaper (featured in a different colourway in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”) and had just enough to cover the phone booth’s interior.
Their children, ages 9 and 11, don’t have their own phones, so use the booth to communicate with family. It’s also become a favorite spot for hiding away with a stack of Archie comic books.
The booth has brought back memories of meandering calls from Marden’s own youth—along with some of that era’s simple joy. As Meier puts it: “It’s got this magical wardrobe kind of feeling.”
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