THE colonial’s pre-eminence as house style of choice on the Island may be indisputable, but it hasn’t kept fans of a more whimsical approach from making their presence felt, with the recent and wide-ranging use of the turret as an architectural feature in new construction.

Evidence of the turret’s storybook appeal is seen across the price spectrum, from supersized Hamptons cedar-shingle mansions to Victorian-style duplexes in a new affordable housing project in Bay Shore.

Mercedes Courland, an interior designer from Roslyn Harbor, says she has always been “in love with that romantic theory of the turret.” For years, whenever she drew designs for her “dream houses,” the sketches invariably included front entry turrets.

And dreams do sometimes come true.

A decade ago, when she met Robert LaPorta, the businessman who would in 2006 become her husband, she “pulled out that dream file and we built it.”

Entry to the couple’s 14-room “seaside castle” overlooking Roslyn Harbor is via a 30-foot-high turret capped with a conical slate roof and ringed with clerestory windows. Inside the 22-foot-diameter foyer, the stairway winds up the curved wall to a balcony circling the space on the second floor. Open to its peak, the inside of the cone has a rough-hewn finish. The walls are painted to resemble Jerusalem stone; the style is a mix of “French country and Adirondack hunting lodge,” Ms. Courland said, adding, “I love the way it distributes traffic throughout the house, instead of long, hotel-like corridors.”

Nowadays the five-bedroom five-and-a-half-bath house on 1.25 acres overlooking Roslyn Harbor is “way too big for the two of us,” Ms. Courland said. She has her eye on a home in Florida and an apartment in Manhattan. In May, the couple listed the property for $7.49 million with Regina Rogers of Laffey Fine Homes.

The turret may be the wow factor and “very unique feature” that captivates a buyer, she said. “It’s just a beautiful space to be in. It is definitely sort of fairy tale-ish.”

Daytree Custom Builders of Ronkonkoma was competing against four other developers when it submitted its proposal for 40 units of affordable housing in Bay Shore five years ago. Because of the traditional yet “unique” design incorporating turrets, the company was awarded the job, said Clara Datre, the president and chief executive of Daytree at Courtland Square, a three-story Victorian-style multifamily complex.

The first two of four gabled and turreted buildings swathed in “Arctic Blue” siding will be ready for occupancy by the end of the year. In each of the three-bedroom duplex units, a turret provides the sitting area for the master bedroom.

Two of the six turreted units — the most expensive in the development — are among the 25 sold so far, for a maximum of $260,000, through the Long Island Housing Partnership, to families earning up to $127,300, or 120 percent of area median income.

Jack and Frank Campo, who own Campo Brothers builders in Port Jefferson, included a 12-foot-diameter turret as a niche in the living room and a sitting area of the 3,500- and 2,800-square-foot Victorian-style model homes they are building in 17 locations, in both subdivisions and on individual lots, from Lake Ronkonkoma to Manorville. Though larger than their best-selling 2,400-square-foot homes and “more expensive to build,” the turreted houses make a “dramatic statement,” Jack Campo said. The 2,800-square-foot model runs from $450,000 to $500,000; the larger model is $600,000 to $700,000, depending on location.

Frank Campo declared the look “a classic that has never gone away.”

Jane McGilloway, who lives in Sea Cliff, noticed a turret room over the porch at Sagamore Hill, the Teddy Roosevelt estate in Oyster Bay, four years ago. Since then she has had an eight-foot-round turret added above the curved porch on her 1880s American Foursquare house.

With seven double-hung transomed windows, flowering window boxes, a witches’ cap roof and a whale-shaped weathervane on top, the turret “added to the value of our house,” Ms. McGilloway said. “There is a certain romance to it.”

Beyond a pair of French doors and a small foyer off the master bedroom, the turret is a place to knit and “sit and read the paper on Sunday morning,” though it isn’t big enough to share with her husband. “I love it so much I would almost want to do it on the other side of our house.”

Around the corner in Sea Cliff, Ray Gentile, a builder, has listed the Victorian he built for his family four years ago at $2.5 million. It has a wraparound porch, long windows, and an octagonal turret that rises through the dining room — space for an extra table when entertaining — and fills one of the children’s bedrooms with light from multiple angles. “There is a trend toward greater detail,” Mr. Gentile said.

In Freeport six years ago, he built the Mews at Copper Beech, a 16-unit development of $600,000 semidetached condominiums. Turrets bracket the outside corners of the rectangular site on four of the eight buildings.

An architectural feature that never goes out of style, it “always endears people and attracts them to a house,” he said. “Buyers look at that as something that separates it from other homes in the neighborhood.”

Since April, Ellen Patterson, a sales associate with Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realty, has had a $1.99 million listing in Northport for a five-year-old turreted stone and stucco home on a pond.

The foyer turret has a stained-glass dome that “gives it a beautiful glow.” As far as Ms. Patterson is concerned, it makes “you feel like you are in the French countryside in a castle.”