JULY 2008 » book review

Model Resort

Rosemary Beach
by Richard Sexton
Pelican Publishing, Gretna, LA; 2007
159 pp.; hardcover; 167 color photographs; 13 color and 2 b/w drawings; $35
ISBN 978-1-58980-403-6

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

Andrés Duany, the mastermind behind Seaside, New Urbanism's flagship town on the Florida Panhandle beachfront, has described its nearby competitor Rosemary Beach as "a critique of Seaside." Rosemary is eight miles east of Seaside, and Duany's Miami-based firm, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ), planned both developments. But while Seaside has turned into an anodyne near-suburb, the gridded setting for the 1998 film The Truman Show, Rosemary Beach could play backdrop for a Riviera romance.

The primary design precedent for Seaside, where development began in 1982, was Florida Cracker architecture. By the time DPZ started writing up guidelines for Rosemary Beach in 1995, the team was willing to cull ideas more broadly: they drew on the likes of Maine harbor boardwalks, medieval street patterns in Prague, West Indies cottages with masonry bases, stuccoed parapets in Curacao, St. Augustine courtyards and French Quarter porches and balconies. The architects and planners and the deep-pocketed conglomerate client, Leucadia National Corp., were also willing to install cul-de-sacs – those dreaded dead-ends that New Urbanists normally avoid for fear of creating disconnected Levittown-like subdivisions. But at Rosemary, cul-de-sacs just add to the atmosphere, giving homeowners somewhere to hide garages and keeping the streets enticingly narrow.

There's barely room for cars to pass or park at Rosemary Beach, though at 107 acres it is slightly larger than Seaside. "It's new and urban in a profound way," explains New Orleans-based photographer Richard Sexton, who wrote Rosemary Beach and took its lush pictures. Though the book looks coffee-table lite, it delves into the strategies that have produced Rosemary's heady sense of place.

Sexton modestly subtitles the first chapter "A Brief History from Inception Through the First Decade," then devotes 24 pages to a thorough chronicle of false starts and delays followed by visionary moves and a real-estate boom. In 1994, the first glimmers of Rosemary Beach were unpromising: half of its future site was slated for development into freestanding St. Augustine-inspired homes, and there was talk of turning the other half into a trailer park or strip mall. But then one landowner died suddenly, Leucadia stepped in, and the other landowner sold out to the corporation, which promptly retained DPZ. Project staffers and consultants kept finding precedents worth importing, whether from Morocco, Argentina, Cuba or Boston. By the late 1990s, a skyline was forming – "a cacophony of rooftops," Sexton writes. Rounded parapets and shingled or galvanized-metal pyramids rose over lupine dunes, wild rosemary scrub, saw-palmetto clusters and Bermuda grass planes.

The author carefully lists the plantings and also names practically every human contributor to the development – not just architects and developers but also the real-estate brokers and graphic designer. The community can now hold 1,500 occupants, in structures designed by influential traditionalists like Ken Tate, Milton Grenfell, Michael Imber, Scott Merrill, Charles Warren and Geoffrey Mouen. Stylistic fence-sitters and borderline Modernists have come to town as well, including Alexander Gorlin, Cesar Pelli, William Rawn and Machado & Silvetti. A Montessori school has opened, not far from stores with cute alliterative names like Sugar Shak and Pish Posh Patchouli. Rituals and traditions, like Easter egg hunts and Christmas tree lightings, have already emerged among the 140 full-time residents. Not that the enclave is perfect – it's expensive (homes have sold for over $6 million), homogenous and elitist, and the azure swimming pools are members-only. As Sexton freely admits, "There isn't much socioeconomic diversity."

But he also argues, persuasively, that Rosemary Beach can serve as a role model for less posh places: it proves that New Urbanism can be "as profitable, and hence as doable, as any other type of land development." For developers nonetheless skeptical about dense new architecture infused with personality and linked by palmetto-lined boardwalks, Sexton's photos will provide thousands of words' worth of further advocacy.  

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