All I had to do as a model was be sweet and kind and a team player, and hang up my clothes, and I got accolades. How easy is that?”

Perhaps being sweet was all Christy Turlington, now 40, had to do to land herself up here, today, in East Hampton, on Long Island, being photographed in a garden with a pool that’s green, not blue, with crickets a-cricketing and chickens pecking, and poplar trees swaying, and lettuce, courgettes and lemon mint all coming up, and it’s 90 degrees in the shade. But I doubt it.

It isn’t her home — it’s a house that has been rented for the shoot — but she has one of these too, somewhere down the road, on “the ocean side”, the chichiest of the little fishing towns on which New Yorkers who have made it have projected their visions of Waspy utopia.

People here show off in cars: open-topped restored classics such as the ones Gatsby would have driven. The weekly markets sell giant, gleaming, kissable fruit and veg. Everything is bigger in the Hamptons. Even the bliss.

Turlington has been here all summer. Since sometime around July 4. ‘‘Well, you know, the kids move out here. And Eddie [Ed Burns, her actor/director husband] is out here. And we go in and out of the city, but we like to keep their routine going. And my little girl has been doing pony camp.’’

Stories are told of Turlington’s sundry kindnesses. A friend of mine starting a yoga-wear label called Yogamat wrote to her asking for advice, and Turlington gave it in buckets. Another spent a boozy evening with her at Claridge’s: ‘‘We talked about childbirth. She’s so beautiful and so normal.’’

Then her assistant, a handsome young buck named Nick, starts rhapsodising about ‘‘a weekend that felt like a week’’ spent ‘‘at the Turlington-Burnses — being like kids again, just playing baseball, no BlackBerrys, nobody working. They are special people’’.

Oh God, so they’re ‘‘special people’’, too. But it’s hard to be annoyed, because Turlington is here, being sparkly and engaging, in the manner of someone who has spent a career making the people around them feel good.

‘‘It took me a long time to open my mind to the Hamptons,’’ she says sunnily, in wide Californian. ‘‘I’m more of a mountain person. But I have no complaints now that I’ve found my own little thing here. I really like it. We don’t see anybody else.’’

She was discovered, aged 14, while riding in Miami, where her father was a Pan Am captain, and modelled at weekends before moving to New York to work full-time after graduating from high school.

Small resemblances to some particularly pulchritudinous breed of mountain goat notwithstanding — her face has lost plumpness in the 25 years since she began modelling, and has become, if it were possible, even more startlingly angular — she is also quite, quite stunning. Shockingly so. Perhaps that’s why she talks this loud and fast. She has had to — in case people get so distracted by her face that they forget to listen.

All summer, Turlington has been playing host to her two sisters and their families. ‘‘One sister came for a month and the other for two months. And it’s literally... They both have teenagers. And babies. So you can imagine.’’ Lots of nannies, then, I say. ‘‘Not even. I have a baby-sitter who comes up for part of the week, but she’s getting married soon. Oh, but I love it. We get along really well. It’s the best for the kids.’’ Like a commune? ‘‘Yeah, very much.’’

Times recommends

• McDonald’s: the world’s local restaurant
• Help me to be a mum: a foyer to fulfilment
• A life online: God likes a laugh