Last weekend featured yet another trip -- this time, a trip to the Florida Panhandle for a board meeting and a weekend of eating and drinking too much.
Aside from that, the most interesting part of the trip was staying in Watercolor, a new "Traditional Neighborhood Development" adjacent to Seaside, one of the original New Urbanism developments by the pioneering architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.
Seaside, you may remember, was where The Truman Show was shot, because it's an idyllic but forced meditation on Simpler Times, when automobiles did not run our lives and rule our collective consciousness, and that made it perfect for the movie's message about both reality TV and reality itself. Watercolor, developed more recently (and still under development) on adjacent land, takes Seaside's egalitarian and pedestrian scale and explodes it into multi-million dollar residences, each with its own distinctive style (although held to strict design and buildind codes), each with large screened-in or wrap-around porches; each capacious (from 2,500 to about 5,000 square feet), and none selling for under $700,000.
To run the meticulously meandering gravel jogging paths on a cool January morning, through these deserted neighborhoods of self-conscious Southern manses, is to have fallen into a combination of The Truman Show and To Kill a Mockingbird. You can't be sure if it's Jim Carrey who will stroll by with his Irish Setter, or Boo Radley will be watching you from a darkened porch.
More likely it'll be Carrey, with a no-foam latte from the nearby Starbucks, who'll stop you, talk your ear off about yesterday's stroll on the beach with his adorable children and next week's project to increase the value of his home, and vanish into the mist.
Good to be home.
--T.A.
OY! Dad & I heard this young human counterpart of a golden retriever--all bouncing enthusiasm--talk about the new urbanism and what is is doing for (to?) Winter Park, where he lives & teaches at Rollins College. Sorry to sound jaded, but even if you get weaned off gasoline-powered vehicles, how do you conserve energy with such palazzos--all have pools, spas, electronics up the wazoo, right? And who's gonna sit on the porch and gaze at the blank, sterile perfection of faux "Our Town"?
Posted by: Mom | January 21, 2008 at 02:47 PM