713 Daniels Lane

Southampton Town keeps a roll of the Sagaponack oceanfront, the Beach Erosion Control District ledger that assesses every parcel behind the dune by the foot. 713 Daniels Lane is entered at 101.76 feet of frontage. The roll exists because the owners of this beach rebuilt it themselves: over the winter of 2013 into 2014, dredges a mile offshore pumped roughly 2.5 million cubic yards of sand along six miles of shoreline, widening the beach by about 150 feet, all of it privately funded by the houses that front it.

Daniels Lane is the ocean road of zip code 11962, New York's most expensive for a decade running and, in several of those years, the most expensive in the country. Truman Capote commissioned the flat-roofed saltbox at number 683 in 1961, when the lane still belonged to potato farmers, and wrote there for the last two decades of his life. Fair Field, the 63-acre compound whose scale moved the town to cap new houses at 20,000 square feet, sits farther along the same lane.

At 713, the proposition is inverted: a three-bedroom, three-bath contemporary of 2,092 square feet on just over half an acre, one of the small houses the lane started with, holding a hundred and two feet of its oceanfront. A private path crosses the dune to the sand, and the beach below it is the one the lane paid to rebuild.