When Weekend houseturnshome

AT first glance, Ulysses Smith, a 44-year-old anticorruption lawyer, and his wife, Sara Berliner, a 41-year-old strategist for an app design studio, may not seem like typical North Fork locals. Her chunky, grey tortoiseshell glasses and his skinny jeans and plaid buttondowns make them look more the part of hip Brooklyn parents than country folk. And yet, locals they are, having traded their Cobble Hill rental in January for a Cutchogue “tree house”, a light-filled, four-bedroom raised ranch they’ve decorated in mid-century style.

For much of the North Fork’s history, being a local meant being born and raised here, perhaps staying to take over the family business. And while there have been plenty of outsiders coming to the 48km peninsula at the East End of Long Island over the past two decades to, say, work in the burgeoning wine industry, there’s another group beginning to trickle in, too: summer residents who decide to stay year-round, often finding inventive ways to commute, or not commute.

Smith and Berliner began vacationing there when Uly, their 8-year-old, was a baby. (He now has a sister, Meridian, 4.) They felt an instant connection to the beach and the rural landscape. They rented for two more summers before starting to rent year-round, visiting on weekends and during school vacations.

But they longed for a vacation place of their own, and in 2015, they closed on the house they now call home, chosen for its airy interiors, wooded acre lot and location in the exclusive Nassau Point neighbourhood, where they can walk to the beach. After about a year of glorious weekend getaways, they began fantasising about making the North Fork their full-time home.

“We loved the access to the outdoors and the natural glow of the light,” Smith said. “On certain days, you can feel like you’re in Provence.”

After a bit of reshuffling of their work schedules — Berliner works from home, but Smith commutes — they were ready. They moved out full-time in January, saying goodbye to Brooklyn, where they had lived for 12 years.

Their Brooklyn friends thought they were crazy, but they immediately felt at home. “Our life was so much calmer,” Berliner said.

Butmoving136kmawayfromManhattan has one big challenge: work. It’s too far for a daily commute, and there aren’t enough high-paying jobs in the region to match the salaries of those who buy weekend homes.

So couples are getting creative, finding ways to divide their time, perhaps commuting into the city a day or two a week for meetings, in what some refer to as “the flip”. Rather than spending two days a week in the country and five in the city, they do the reverse, sometimes even opting to pay for a hotel if they have multiple days of meetings in Manhattan.

The desire to move to the North Fork often happens as the summer winds down, when the reality of returning home sets in.

Ian Wile, 45, and his wife, Rosalie Rung, 44, bought their Greenport summer house in 2002, but it wasn’t until Wile, who was between film-editing jobs, spent an entire summer there with his son in 2011 that they considered relocating. After weeks of daily kayaking and beach trips, he dreaded going back to their Tribeca apartment.

When he saw a town notice in the local paper offering aquaculture grants to anyone interested in bringing oysters back to the Peconic Bay, he applied on a whim. “I didn’t know anything about oysters, I was just thinking, ‘How can I extend my time here?’” he said.

He got the grant — he was apparently the first to call — which included the use of 4 farmable hectares in the Peconic Bay. Since it takes about a year for an oyster farm to produce, he reluctantly returned to the city and got a freelance job with a production company in contract with the