New Construction Blocking the View? ‘If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them.’

What do you do when the neighbors’ construction threatens your view?

That’s the situation Katie and Sam Benrubi found themselves in when the owners of the small beachfront 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, N.Y., sat on a gentle rise and had a beautiful ocean view over the top of Nick and Andrea Papapetros’s home.

“We were so concerned we were going to lose our view,” said Ms. 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 Mr. Benrubi, 69, who hosts a wine-focused podcast, “The Grape Nation,” got in touch with the architects designing their neighbors’ 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.