A Decamping to a Bro ad Channel Swim Club

A few years ago, co-founders Coming Soon Helena Barquet and Fabiana Faria left the Upper East Side for the Rockaways.

- By Wendy Goodman

Toward the beginning of the pandemic, Fabiana Faria and her wife, Helena Barquet, got in their car almost every weekend and headed out to Far Rockaway. "We were just looking for a little bungalow, something to fix up and maybe sell," says Faria. After a couple months of unsuccessful visits to fixer-uppers in various states of disrepair, their friend and real-estate broker called them with an idea. She had an unusual property, she said, in Broad Channel-a small island in Jamaica, Queens, where many houses once stood on stilts. It was the former location of the neighborhood's swim club, meaning it was right on Jamaica Bay with a large beach that had been transformed into a lush garden by its previous owners. "It looked like nothing like we'd seen," Faria says.