ARKNESS does fall in paradise, a word some people who live in wealthy, woodsy Lloyd Harbor use almost automatically to describe their spacious, rolling, more than nine-square-mile waterfront village.

In fact, it gets dark early on short winter days because the entirely residential village, where homes now cost $1 million and up, has no streetlights. Indeed, in a move that put it in the forefront of the "dark sky" movement on Long Island, Lloyd Harbor long ago clamped down on residential outdoor lighting whose glare intrudes on neighbors.

Such lights can violate a village ethic of preserving the night and promoting gracious privacy, but in Lloyd Harbor, which is on the North Shore of extreme western Suffolk County, they would shine from afar. Minimum lot size here is two acres, and not a few of the village's 1,250 homes sit on more acres than that.

Buyers are drawn by a sense that they will inhabit a wonderfully rarified place that is not impossibly far from New York City — not much more than an hour's drive away in optimum traffic conditions — yet one that feels and even looks, within limits, like the country.

Their children will be able to attend classes in the Cold Spring Harbor Union Free School District, an elite public school system, which sent 95 percent of its graduates to four-year colleges last year.

HOUSING ranges from a sprinkling of true estates and historic older homes to colonials, contemporaries, brick mansionettes built on property of the former Friends World College and low-slung but supersized ranches and farm ranches, which have partial second floors, laying back off private roads. Mature trees, including a massive black oak dating to 1450 that is believed to be the oldest surviving black oak in the county, rise from roadsides and lawns and fields. Water views are at every turn.

"I think for many of us who live here it really is paradise," said the village mayor, Lee Hairr, the president of an environmental consulting company in Garden City and a village resident for 14 years. "I consider it the most pleasant and delightful place I have ever lived, and I have lived in several places."

Mr. Hairr, who grew up in North Carolina, said the setting was all but perfect. "It not only has the ambience of all the natural resources of our village, it provides a privacy and a quality of life that you find somewhat rare, at least in this area." The village is within the town of Huntington.

Spacious by the standards of Long Island villages, Lloyd Harbor occupies a peninsula jutting northward into Long Island Sound. It is divided into two parts: West Neck — a name nobody uses — and Lloyd Neck. In all, it has about 20 miles of shoreline along Cold Spring Harbor, Lloyd Harbor, Huntington Harbor, Huntington Bay and Long Island Sound.

West Neck begins a five-minute drive from the center of the hamlet of Huntington, a vital downtown of shops, stores, restaurants and boutiques convenient to the village, which has not a single shop or commercial storefront. Lloyd Neck, once called Horse Head because of its distinctive shape, is more remote and not the kind of place to forget buying milk on the way home.

The two-lane main village thoroughfare, West Neck Road, leads northward from Huntington hamlet past the Lloyd Harbor village police station, where a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer topiary with a red Christmas ornament for a nose stood guard during the holiday season.

After crossing to Lloyd Neck on a narrow causeway, the road becomes Lloyd Harbor Road and skirts the narrow body of water with the same name. Connecting roads throughout the village are private and maintained by residents.

Carol Tintle, a senior vice president of the Daniel Gale Agency and the manager of the company office in Cold Spring Harbor, said Lloyd Harbor prices rose sharply last spring, in part because bad weather in January and February kept buyers away. "Once the snow was gone, a lot of houses changed hands," she said. "People like to get their house shopping done before the tennis and golf season."

The current, slightly cooler, market continues to be driven by a limited supply of houses and strong demand for the village and the Cold Spring Harbor school district. "What makes Lloyd Harbor so expensive is the schools," Ms. Tintle said. "There is a big demand for private schools on the North Shore, but there are not very many and they are very hard to get into. The Cold Spring Harbor schools are ranked very high."

Asking prices for 19 houses currently on the market begin at $1,100,000, peak at $5,200,000 and hit an astounding median of $2,695,000, a million dollars more than the current median sale price. The surging values are a wonder even for residents. "I am astonished," Mr. Hairr said. Generally, prices are highest for waterfront homes with private docks.

Kit Schlaugies, an associate broker for Coldwell Banker Residential in Huntington, said a two-acre parcel without a house would now sell for up to $900,000, not much less than the median price for which homes sold five years ago. As for homes in the current market, "rarely do we see anything under $1 million," she said.

The village, which incorporated in 1926, has tended to dislike a trend in which older homes are knocked down to make way for replacements so large they crowd even two-acre lots. "A lot of people are coming in and tearing down houses to build huge new houses, and from my point of view I would like to see the village do something to maintain its character," said Joan McGee, the village historian.

One major step has been taken. A regulation in effect for about a year, unpopular with some who think it encroaches on property rights, limits new homes on two-acre parcels to 6,000 square feet. There are no limits for homes built on larger parcels. Mr. Hairr said the regulation addressed what he called the McMansion effect.

WITH large, public open spaces, the village escapes being exclusionary. Caumsett State Park, a 1,500-acre former English manor-style estate that takes up the center portion of Lloyd Neck, offers hiking, biking, bridle paths, bird watching, cross-country skiing and scenic views. Admission is $6 for a car from May to October and free during other months.

Once part of 1,750 acres that Marshall Field III purchased in 1921, the parkland was acquired by the state in 1961 from Mr. Field's widow. The former Marshall Field House is leased by Queens College for a center for environmental teaching and research.

Nearby, the 80-acre Target Rock National Wildlife Refuge, established in 1967, is named for Target Rock, a glacial erratic visible at low tide, which legend holds occupying British troops used for target practice in the 18th century. The refuge harbors upland forest, a stony beach and vernal ponds. There is a one-mile loop trail through the woods and a three-quarter mile walking road to the beach. Admission is $4 for a vehicle.

The Nature Conservancy on Long Island owns a 41-acre pasture and farm field near the Caumsett State Park and 17.5-acre Mill Cove Preserve, where a mill powered by tidal currents is in the best condition of any such mill in the country, according to the conservancy.

A town of Huntington swimming beach on Cold Spring Harbor, open to all town residents, is adjacent to a larger village swimming beach for village residents only. The village beach has tennis courts. Both are on West Neck.

The Immaculate Conception seminary of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre is also on West Neck.

Results on standardized tests taken by students in the Cold Spring Harbor schools handily exceed state and national averages. The 2,100-student district includes all of Cold Spring Harbor and Lloyd Neck in Suffolk County and Laurel Hollow in Nassau.

One of the district's three elementary schools is in Lloyd Harbor. Students in Grades 7 to 12 attend the Cold Spring Harbor Junior and Senior High School. The district superintendent, Frederick D. Volp, pointed out that Newsweek ranked the high school 19th among the country's top 100 high schools last year.

Mean scores on the College Board reasoning tests for the 120 graduates in the class of 2003 were 579 in verbal and 605 in math. Both scores are dozens of points higher than state and national averages.

Dr. Volp said the district strives to hire and train top teachers. "We rely on the latest educational research to inform our instruction," he said. Money for new classrooms in all schools and for an $11 million performing arts center and gymnasium in the junior-senior high school to open next fall were included in a $40.7 million bond voters approved in 2001. Dr. Volp said no school budget had been defeated in 25 years.

MATINECOCK INDIANS, the first known inhabitants of the area, called Lloyd Neck "Caumsett," meaning a place of sharp rocks, and sold 3,000 acres to English settlers in 1654. In 1676, James Lloyd, a Boston merchant, took title and under a colonial patent became lord of the manor of Queens Village, as the area was then known.

His son, Henry Lloyd, moved to the neck in 1711 with his wife, Rebecca, and built what the Lloyd Harbor Historical Society identifies as a manor house of post-medieval architectural style, which was distinctly modern for its day. The house, on the grounds of the Caumsett State Park, still stands and is now leased by the historical society, which is restoring it.

Henry's son, Joseph, built a larger home nearby in 1766-67 that is now owned by the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities of Cold Spring Harbor. The house is open to the public from 1 to 5 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays from late May through early October.

In addition to giving the village a name, the Lloyds are associated with Jupiter Hammond, born on Lloyd Neck in 1711, educated by the family and the first published black poet in Colonial America, according to the historical society. His first published poem, titled "An Evening Prayer," appeared on Dec. 25, 1760.

There is a woeful coda. Hammond, who died in about 1806, was a slave owned by the Lloyds and was never emancipated. He was buried on Lloyd land in an unmarked grave.