An Open Landscape, Between the Beach and the Bay, Becomes a Family's Dream Home

When Julie Frist was 12 or 13, her father would take her for driving lessons on a narrow spit of land, not much wider than a football field in places, that separated the flat calm of Long Island’s Shinnecock Bay from the roaring waters of the Atlantic. The quiet road, only partly paved and bordered by scraggly wind-whipped pines, cut a line between the dunes and the marsh, and her father would sit Julie on his lap and let her control the wheel; pebbles would fly up through the holes in the floor of their beat-up station wagon. “Dad, he’s like a secret race car driver,” Julie tells me.

There is no one letting their preteen daughter steer the family beater along these roads now. Houses have sprung up along the formerly empty land overlooking the ocean; traffic is stately but Southampton-ste