Edition: U.S. / Global

Storming the Last Civilized Sandbox

Published: May 25, 2000

PAUL HALLINGBY JR. loves this Caribbean enclave's coral-colored houses, its worn chintz, engraved stationery and imported household help. He treasures what he calls his ''old-fashioned beach house'': a $9 million, 6,500-square-foot villa with two circular driveways and a private beach.

Then there is the always-reassuring sight of the neighboring Lyford Cay Club, a pink mansion with Tara-style white columns, where Mr. Hallingby, a managing director emeritus of Bear, Stearns & Company, has been a member for 16 years. He and his friends Sandra McConnell, an Avon heiress, and Bill Paley Jr., a son of William S. Paley and his wife, Babe, appreciate the club's conservative prohibitions. Couples must be married to stay overnight, public displays of affection are frowned upon and bikinis cannot be itsy-bitsy. Everybody still chuckles at the scolding Sir John M. Templeton, the British philanthropist, received for wearing white bathing trunks that went embarrassingly transparent when he hit the water.

''It's a very pleasant social life,'' Mr. Hallingby said of this thousand-acre gated resort community 12 minutes from Nassau. Here on ''Lifeless Cay,'' as many residents have called it, there are no stores, no restaurants, no Manolo Blahniks.

At least, not at the moment. But the clicking of those sky-high heels is getting closer. The worlds of fashion, celebrity and, gasp, shiny new money, are invading this part of the paradise where the Duke of Windsor once reigned as governor. Where reasonable-size villas once ruled, 50,000-square-foot houses are springing up. ''Who needs that?'' Mr. Hallingby said. He is considering selling up and moving out.

Is the last bastion of civilized society in danger of becoming extinct? Like Southampton, N.Y., Greenwich, Conn., and most recently Palm Beach, Fla., Lyford Cay is being invaded by the young and the feckless. And almost nobody likes it.

''This always happens to gated communities,'' said Elliott Sclar, director of the Urban Planning Program at Columbia University. ''The middle class always ruins the upper class's fun.'' Especially, he added, when the middle class has money.

So habitues of this Eisenhower-era retreat for the uber-moneyed set -- Nicholas F. Brady, the former Secretary of State; the Bacardi family -- now confront party-hearty spillover from nearby Paradise Island. That's where Sol Kerzner, a South African developer, has built Atlantis, a gaudy $850 million resort, and revitalized the Ocean Club, an estate once owned by the Old Guard grocery heir Huntington Hartford. Beaches where Mr. Hartford once sunned in Bermuda shorts now host Leonardo di Caprio, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan and the thong-clad Gloria Estefan.

There, Lyfordians complain, goes the 'hood.

''I have my own set of values,'' said Peter Nygard, an outsider whom some call the Canadian Hugh Hefner. His hotly debated home is a 150,000-square-foot ''hut'' -- a Polynesian village by way of Robinson Crusoe with flocks of 300 peacocks, parrots and cockatoos free-ranging indoors and out, and a lagoon through the house. The spread is growing; he's pumping sand daily to expand his stretch of beach on his five acres.

The typical Lyfordian blue blood, ''is afraid to step out of the box,'' Mr. Nygard said, adding ''I'm part of a new generation.'' Indeed, and it is taking root inside the gates, just half a mile from the Lyford Cay Club. Mr. Nygard, who is a self-made clothing designer and ''is somewhere over 50,'' said he grew up in poverty in Finland, the son of a seamstress mother and a father who worked in a bakery. Now, he is worth more than $500 million.

''I have no choice whether to be old money or new money. I'm new money, based on a new set of values, and that's based on merit,'' he said, looking over a stream of purple steam belching from two 40-foot urns.

Hospitality chez Nygard is eye-popping, too. Where Mr. Hallingby's housekeeper offers a cocktail to guests, Mr. Nygard offers a masseuse. He has four housemen who cavort on trampolines anchored in the ocean. He has a 40-foot dining room table that drops down to become a disco dance floor once dinner (and bird droppings) are cleared. On karaoke nights, scantily clad young women dance while he sings ''I Did It My Way'' (his favorite song) until 5 a.m.

''Nygard Cay is a perfect neighbor for Lyford Cay,'' he said, standing on his beach with a red and green parrot on his shoulder.

Some of the rich and famous certainly think so. Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson came by two weeks ago. So did Robert DeNiro. Michael Jackson has dropped by. And George and Barbara Bush, whose photograph adorns his office. ''I've built them a presidential suite,'' Mr. Nygard said, pointing to a cabana built into artificial cliffs some 60 feet high. No, the former first couple haven't stayed over.

Like his tony neighbors, he favors classical music but prefers to blast it through his compound. Each day at sunset, Cocoy, a houseman, has orders to time the last chord on a CD so it crashes to a finale just as the sun slides into the ocean.