You can pedal a paddleboat or kick back in the comfort of your stylishly appointed Great Room, gazing upon a panorama of sparkling, illuminated fountains and rippling waters.

OK, you may want to wait until the temperatures warm a bit, but the feeling of southern comfort is all here, just a beach pebble's throw from ... the Long Island Expressway.

This particular setting is available at The Hamlet on Olde Oyster Bay, a sold-out gated community of 370 upscale condominiums and single-family houses which is not on an "olde bay" at all, but rather abuts a 4 1/2-acre artificial lake, just off exit 48 of the LIE in Plainview.

It features what local developers are touting as the Florida Style, a concept that evokes resort living, surrounded by amenities, architectural designs and decorative details more attuned to Palm Beach than Plainview. The style has become popular primarily with empty-nesters, who desire (and can afford) to split their time between New York and Florida, rather than retire full-time down south.

"It starts with the design of the home and follows through to the whole concept of how people live," said Ron Bloomfield, director of sales and marketing for the Westbury-based Holiday Organization, builder of The Hamlet on Olde Oyster Bay as well as numerous other lifestyle communities on Long Island and in Florida.

"It has to do with the healthy aspect of Florida living," Bloomfield said. "It's fitness centers, tennis courts, pools and golf courses. It's gated communities that offer a variety of leisure activities. Leisure time is precious today, especially after 9/11, and gated communities provide a secure refuge."

"Florida Style says, 'light and airy,'" added Ellen Graham, senior interior design coordinator for Holiday. "It's soft earth tones, big expanses of open space with 18-foot ceilings and high windows with the sun coming in. We use a lot of detailing and applied decorative molding, and we do faux painting on the walls to add a feeling of warmth."

Other interior design aspects include the use of a great deal of tile on interior floors and natural stone surfaces in kitchens and baths, Graham said. Walls have built-in shelving and cabinetry to give dimension to what otherwise would be a huge, high expanse of bare wall.

At another Holiday Organization development, The Hamlet at Willow Creek in Mount Sinai, the model walls have rounded edges, rather than 90-degree angular corners, to suggest softness and comfort.

Kathy Sheck, director of merchandising and design for the Beechwood Organization in Jericho, said she believes the Florida Style may be a misnomer. Nowadays, she said, most decorating trends start in the West, primarily California, and then head east. "As people travel and move, they bring these ideas with them," said Sheck, whose company is building several Country Pointe developments on Long Island, some aimed at empty-nesters.

At the recent National Homebuilders Convention in Las Vegas, Sheck said many of the community designs she saw highlighted a concept called the "outside living room": a living room that almost seems to blend with the backyard.

Glen Chervany, a partner in the Commack-based architectural firm, Axelrod & Chervany, added that he has seen a nationwide trend toward open floor designs, expansive windows, high foyers and ceilings growing since the 1980s. "We have noticed this in a lot of Florida homes," Chervany said. "Maybe the trend has just caught up here."

Regardless of whether the Florida Style actually originated from the West or the South, it tends to feature wide-open entry foyers, which flow directly into a "super room" and offer a wide-angle view straight through the back windows or glass doors.

The handsomely landscaped backyards of some of these northern homes now include hot tubs embedded in elaborate patios, finished in large paving stones. There are trellises, waterfalls and often views of an adjacent golf course - all reminiscent of Florida living.

"Down here in Florida we have verandas, patios and terraces that actually become an integral part of the interior, because even in wintertime, patio doors can be opened for entertaining," said Heidi Ryshard, president of Ultimate Interiors Inc., in North Miami Beach. Ryshard, who divides her time between projects in New York and Florida, is designing The Colony at Delray Beach, a Holiday development.

In both Florida and New York, Ryshard designs basically monochromatic interiors, which she said provide a relaxing, warm and neutral backdrop for living.

"We call it transitional. It's neither contemporary nor traditional, it's between the two," she said. "We pay a lot of attention to the perimeter, and the furniture is secondary. We put our money into window treatments, flooring, molding and drywall. We'll spend nothing on a sofa, but a fortune on the wall behind it."

She added that with such elevated ceilings, it becomes almost necessary to break up the monumental walls with moldings and architectural detail.

"I say to my clients, 'You buy these homes with 20- foot ceilings and you think it's wonderful until you put in a sofa that's 3 feet high - and then you wonder what you'll do with the other 17 feet,'" Ryshard said.

She estimated that it costs 20 percent to 30 percent more in New York to achieve the same Florida look, because labor, materials, sales taxes and real estate all cost substantially more. Also, new provisions in the state building code require higher energy efficiencies, further increasing the costs of these high-end residences.

Ryshard continues to be amazed that Florida Style has gotten such an enthusiastic reception in the North.

"It's been remarkably well received," she said in a telephone interview. "There's a builder in New Jersey who only uses Florida designers on his projects. And when I tell people here my work is so well received in New York, they can't believe it."

Bob Altavilla, of Bob Altavilla Interiors in Manhattan, is designing interiors for HarborView at Port Washington, a development of condominiums, town houses and golf course villas for residents 55 and older, built by Bernard Janowitz Construction Corp.

"Most of what we do for an over-55 crowd is very neutral and light and transitional in style," Altavilla said. "All of our older clients are splitting their time between here and Florida or California or Arizona, but they're not abandoning life on Long Island. They're maintaining a presence here because of families, grandkids and connections to people."

Altavilla added that the neutral, light background of the HarborView units, which range from $334,000 to more than $1 million, helps these split-year residents adapt to their changing environments. "They are integrating important pieces taken from another life and they want it all to blend together," he said.

Then, too, most of his over-55 clients are scaling down from large single-family residences on Long Island, which they sold once the children left home.

"They have to learn to look at space in a very different way," Altavilla said. He noted that using space more effectively and having multifunctional rooms became a trend in Florida several years ago - and now it is popular here.

"The idea of the living room as a seldom-used room is gone. It's now more of a great room concept with living, dining and media all taking place there," he said. "And a second or third bedroom now becomes a combination home office. They don't keep bedrooms set up awaiting the arrival of a guest anymore."

The growing contrast between the decorating styles of the over-55 crowd and younger families is striking, Altavilla said.

"Our clients are heading in two very different directions," he said. "The older clients prefer a transitional and more contemporary look with neutral colors, while our younger clients are going more toward color and a traditional look, because they never did it before. I am working now with a client in her early 30s who is doing jewel colors and a real heavy Ralph Lauren kind of look."

Marilyn Larsen, president of Lane Realty in Jericho and a regular visitor to model homes in Florida, says that in some ways the Florida market offers "more sophisticated and detailed" decorating ideas than on Long Island.

"A couple of weeks ago I went to a place in Jupiter where the homes started at roughly $675,000. The molding package they offered was just amazing," Larsen said. She was also impressed by the huge, seamless panes of an unusual window glass on model homes at a development called San Michele in Palm Beach Garden.

"It's called impact glass," explained Bill Dougherty, a general contractor on the San Michele project. "It's impact-resistant and made to withstand flying objects at up to 160 miles an hour. Objects simply won't penetrate it."

He said the window system was instituted in Florida as protection against hurricanes. It is expensive, but should, he believes, be highly applicable for residential and commercial use in the Northeast. (New York's new state building code, which took effect Jan. 1, requires that in Nassau and western Suffolk, windows in new homes must withstand objects slammed into them at 110 mph; in eastern Suffolk, windows must withstand objects flying at 120 mph.)

Asked about other innovations he sees in Florida that might be adapted for use in New York, Dougherty said builders there are experimenting with a different spray-in material to form the shell of the house. It can be delivered to a construction site by the truckload and used to fill holes in a concrete block house frame, a common practice in Florida, or placed in the open areas between the studs and the outer shell of a wood frame house.

"It's fire-resistant and energy-efficient. It insulates and soundproofs the home and it adds to the structural integrity," Dougherty said. "It would definitely be practical on Long Island."

Sheck of Beechwood said many of the company's snowbird clients have designed their Florida homes with features such as ceramic tile throughout the first floor, which epitomizes a warm-weather look.

"When they're in Florida it's warm down there, and then when they come up here it's warm up here," Sheck said. "So they bring that look that they're accustomed to into their home up here in the Northeast."

Usually, the empty-nesters are "well-traveled, sophisticated buyers, who have stayed at the best resorts and resort areas," she added. "They see details there that are comforting, beautiful, restful and low maintenance and want to bring them up here to their primary residence. That way they can capture some of that feeling of being away at a resort in their own home."

Ellen Mitchell is a frequent contributor to Newsday. She may be reached via e-mail at orientmitchell @aol.com.