Once upon a time, a magical strip of Siesta Key stole the hearts of everyone who came across it. Hidden behind the secluded gates of the Sanderling Club, south of Point of Rocks, a tranquil idyll emerged from a vivid tropical landscape.

“If I close my eyes, I see the beach, the ocean, the cabanas and the clubhouse,” says Sarasota artist Andrea Dasha Reich, who was completely smitten by the sight the first time she visited 24 years ago. She felt transported to a Mediterranean oasis.

“Or,” she says, “it could have been anywhere—a pearl in the ocean where you could forget everything.”

Since 1946, generations of residents have recreated, picnicked, communed with nature and socialized on this little gem of a beach. A luckier few gathered family and friends at 25 pristine cabanas that graced the water’s edge. Those historic, architecturally significant structures at 7450 Sanderling Road stood until Sept. 26, 2024, when Hurricane Helene and her 7-foot storm surge decimated paradise. Only concrete slabs and memories remain.

While the loss of a couple dozen cabanas might seem like a trivial matter amid the immense damage Helene—and later Hurricane Milton—caused up and down the Gulf Coast, lovers of Old Sarasota and devotees of the Sarasota School of Architecture from around the world are gutted. International architecture and design website ArchDaily published a story about the cabanas being lost to the storm, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art had just launched a retrospective of the work of the famed architect who designed them: Paul Rudolph.

In 1952, after parting ways with his architectural partner Ralph Twitchell, Rudolph, then 34, accepted a commission to create a master plan for a recreational area in Sanderling, his first non-residential project. In Sanderling’s subtropical haven, the architect planned an observation tower, clubhouse and pool. With innovation and respect for the environment, Rudolph also designed side-by-side one-story cabanas—unobtrusive cinder block huts featuring concrete patios and shady overhangs.

Five pods with five white structures tiptoed quietly along the shore. Each barrel-vault roof sported charming waves crafted from two layers of bent plywood sheathing, like undulating whitecaps dancing in the sea. They were simple and inexpensive to build, and there were no kitchens, bathrooms or frills. Amenities would come later in the clubhouse, a breezy midcentury modern edifice that still stands.

Rudolph went on to design iconic buildings, including an addition to Sarasota High School, Riverview High School, the Deering residence and the Umbrella House—all considered modern marvels—and later became chair of the Yale School of Architecture. Many count Rudolph, who died in 1997, as one of the most important architects of the 20th century.

The Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo, Brazil, awarded the Sanderling project an international architectural prize, and in 1994, the cabanas were recognized by the National Register of Historic Places.

Always unconventional, the Sanderling Club community was prized for its convivial social life and reverence for untamed nature. Retired science writer Andrea Graddis lived on Heron Lagoon in an understated ranch house for 10 years, beginning in 2014. The cabanas were “the town square,” she says. People and dogs promenaded daily, stopping often to schmooze. Graddis says she admired the “ecologically friendly” aspect of the modest, restrained structures, and thought Rudolph displayed a great sense of humor with his rooftop waves—a “subtle artifice at play with nature.” She tears up remembering lost bucolic days afloat in the Gulf. In October, after Milton finished destroying her home, she relocated to the mainland.

Jessie Teague bought her parents’ Sarasota School of Architecture home across the road from the cabanas in 1981. She says three generations of family members spent a heavenly 48 years at what they called “Camp Sanderling.”

“Adults and children alike could safely skip across to the cabanas for a morning dip, coffee, sandwiches, bocce ball and sunset gatherings,” Teague says. Her parents’ generation savored the low-key escape the cabanas offered. Couples sipped cocktails on patios while children frolicked in sand and sea. The husbands called themselves “The Fishermen,” even though they didn’t fish, and gathered for weekly brown bag lunches, laughs and backgammon.

“They ran big companies on the side, but no one would have known it,” Teague says. “They didn’t need to tell you.”

Inside, the Teagues' cabana was “super practical,” she says. Sand, fish and seaweed regularly sloshed under the sliding door, and she found rodents and roaches camped out in the original built-in shelving. Teague says she had no desire to “pimp out” the interior with plumbing. “Everyone showered at the pull chain fixture outside,” she says.

Teague sold her house just nine weeks before Helene hit. Now living in Wisconsin with her family, she’s far from violent storms, but mourning the fairytale reverie she enjoyed for decades.

Renowned architect Max Strang of Strang Design grew up in his parents’ architecturally significant pre-cast concrete and glass home designed by Gene Leedy in Winter Haven, Florida. Magazine photos and books about the Sanderling cabanas were imprinted on his mind at a young age. They seemed magical.

When Strang, his wife Tamara and their kids moved to Heron Lagoon in 2018, they weren’t disappointed. Rudolph’s dreamy cabanas became the social hub of the neighborhood for an athletic family that paddleboarded, surfed, snorkeled and swam. Strang, a world traveler, has witnessed 30 of Sarasota’s fabled green flashes during Sanderling sunsets, but nowhere else.

“We walked to Turtle Beach in the electric blue water and got lost in time,” says Strang. “You felt like you were 11 years old. We had crystal clear water. Dolphins and manatees swam nearby. We interacted with nature, land and sea. It was the best. We played with otter pups as they sunned on the deck. Hummingbirds, ospreys, owls, woodpeckers and snakes made it like a nature preserve. For me, those natural contacts were so intense and satisfying—my best days.” Sanderling’s abundant vegetation resembled a jungle safari. “It was a charming wilding experiment to hide the modest, ground-dwelling houses behind the foliage, creating road canopies,” he says.

The Strang children relished the cabanas, too. “My son had a homecoming party there, and our daughter would frequently join us after spending hours paddleboarding in the Gulf,” Strang says. “Those cabanas underscored the spirit of the Sarasota School of Architecture and were the perfect stage set for our family memories.”

In this enchanted land of shared sandwiches and sand pies, parties and New Year’s Eve bonfires, sea level rise of between 7 and 11 inches became a scary new threat. The Gulf of Mexico took a bite out of the cabanas in 1998 and moved the southernmost set of buildings back 10 feet. The stairs down to the water were carried away. Hurricane Idalia washed out several units in August 2023. Hurricane Helene landed the final, cruelest blows. Many homes in the community were also obliterated.

With today’s skyrocketing insurance costs, plus coastal building regulations and environmental restrictions,
not to mention rising real estate values, is restoration even possible?

“The destruction of this historically registered work of architecture will certainly pose some complicated questions,” says Strang. “Can they be rebuilt in their original location? Should we rebuild them in their original location? And if we do, what adaptations to the design can be undertaken that still maintain Rudolph’s original intent?”

People will always want to live on the water, and Sanderling remains a cultural asset and symbol of Sarasota’s place in the architecture world.

Marty Hylton—an architect, preservationist and historian and the president of Architecture Sarasota—documents, conserves and advocates for cultural heritage, especially when it comes to protecting the legacy of the Sarasota School of Architecture. Hylton originally came to Sarasota on vacation in the 1980s, saw a Paul Rudolph building and proclaimed, “That’s what I want to do!”

Like Strang, Hylton is passionate about the possibilities of the future—encouraging transformative eco-friendly design and finding ways to make the coastal built environment more resilient. He received word that the cabanas had been destroyed while attending the Rudolph retrospective at the Met.

“It’s a complicated conversation,” Hylton says. “There are national and international implications for all threatened structures on the coast. How do we keep people in places that they love as long as we can? We cannot save everything.”

The cabanas can’t be easily rebuilt because of their historic designation, but Sarasota can become a model for other coastal communities. “This is the story of one community in one city on one island, but it is a common issue across the region,” says Strang.

Arguments over climate change and overbuilding on barrier islands aside, nostalgia for Sanderling’s cabanas and their incomparable sense of place endures. “Our collective memory becomes our collective loss,” says Hylton.