The community is accessible only be private ferry service and only during the summer, and automobiles are forbidden. Houses are not winterized; they are simply opened and aired out each Memorial Day and then closed up by mid-September. For all its brevity, the social season hews to lovingly preserved traditions that can make even a first-time visitor wistful. Clambakes and BYOC (bring your own cutlery) suppers convene at a meeting hall informally dubbed “the casino.” At the tennis club, players are required to wear white.
Passed down within families, the cottages mostly belong to third- or even fourth-generation descendants of their original occupants. Properties rarely go on the market, so when a small three-story house suddenly became available, a Manhattan executive who had fond boyhood memories of summering here

jumped at the chance to introduce his own family to this sandy Brigadoon. Though structurally sound, the cottage needed attention. Decorator Thomas Jayne, who had worked on the family’s apartment in New York, was called in. “First, we made sure things were stable, so there wouldn’t be worries about maintenance,” he says. “The houses here really taking a beating during the winter.”
The remote location makes it difficult to ship goods in or out; thus another local quirk is that the few houses sold usually come with the furniture. Jayne’s next task was to salvage whatever of the cottage’s windfall he though reusable, such as a set of Hitchcock side chairs (“Not something you’d normally find in a beach house”) and spool-turned wood beds.