New construction blocking the view? ‘If you can’t beat them, join them.’

WHAT do you do when the neighbours’ construction threatens your view?

That’s the situation Katie and Sam Benrubi found themselves in when the owners of the small beach front house in front of them on Fire Island began working on plans to knock it down and build a taller structure in its place.

The Benrubis’ house in Ocean Bay Park, New York, sat on a gentle rise and had a beautiful ocean view over the top of Nick and Andrea Papapetros’ home.

“We were so concerned we were going to lose our view,” said Katie Benrubi, 65, a corporate branding and merchandising consultant. “We’re one house back” from the ocean, she added, “yet we can sit on our deck or anywhere upstairs and have wonderful ocean views.”

So she and Sam Benrubi, 69, who hosts a wine-focused podcast, The Grape Nation, got in touch with the architects designing their neighbours’ house to ask what they should expect. The answer they got from Paul Coughlin, who runs Coughlin Scheel Architects with his wife, Annie Scheel, wasn’t reassuring.

“I said, ‘I’m not trying to be the bad guy here, but yes, we are doing a house, and with all the new building codes out there, everything is 10 feet (3 metres) taller than it used to be, at least’,” Coughlin said, because of flood-zone requirements. “So I said, ‘Your view is going to be heavily compromised’.”

The Benrubis asked Coughlin Scheel to do renderings of what their view would look like after construction. Dismayed by what they saw, they decided to embrace the adage “If you can’t beat them, join them”. They hired the architects to renovate and expand their own home at the same time work was being done next door, to make the most of the view that was left.

Fortunately, they found sympathetic neighbours in Nick Papapetros, 59, a dentist, and Andrea Papapetros, 58, who raised the couple’s four children, who are now adults.

“We did want something that was architecturally significant,” Nick Papapetros said. They also wanted a place that was more spacious and comfortable than the one they had, which Andrea Papapetros’ parents had bought in 1964. “But we tried to be cognisant of our neighbours and what we were building.”

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The two-storey, 2,200-square-foot house with four bedrooms that the architects designed for the Papapetroses is “kind of a single bar that we rotated off parallel from the beach, just slightly”, Coughlin said.

“That gives them a little more privacy from the neighbour to the west, and gives them a little perspective down the beach instead of being perpendicular to the water.”

Clad in cedar siding, the house is topped by a gently sloped standing-seam metal roof, which the architects tried to keep as low as possible. On the eastern side of the house, Coughlin said, “we chopped off a little pie-shaped piece of the second floor to give a bit more of an ocean view” to the Benrubis, while creating space for a deck.

Behind this new house, they extended the Benrubis’ home to the east, where sight lines were more open, adding roughly 600 sq ft, which brought the total size up to about 2,000 sq ft. The primary living spaces are on the second floor, which was largely rebuilt, with walls of sliding glass doors that open to a new 1,600-sq-ft deck. A new primary suite and two other bedrooms that can be used by the couple’s grown children are on the first floor.

Inside the Papapetros house, they embraced a minimalist palette with simple white cabinetry and walls and ceilings lined with Douglas fir panelling. The Benrubi family wanted more of a cottage-y vibe, with painted beadboard on many walls, blue-and-white textiles and a living room rug woven from natural grasses.

Island Contracting did the construction on both homes. Work on the Papapetros home began in the spring of 2021 and was completed in the summer of 2022, at a cost of about US$700 per sq ft. Work on the Benrubi house started in the fall of 2021 and was finished near the end of summer 2022, at a cost of about US$400 per sq ft.

Both families are now thrilled with what they’ve gained – not least of all, amicable neighbourly relations.

“It’s awesome,” Nick Papapetros said of his family’s house.

“It’s divine,” Katie Benrubi said of her own.

Working with the neighbours rather than fighting them was key. She added: “I don’t know if it would have worked out had we used a different architect or had they used a different architect.”