Gulf Coast news Articles, Beach News, 30a Events, Northwest Florida Real estate

March 7, 2008

Minneapolis - St. Paul Mag "most original in American Tourism"

Beach Properties of Florida agent Chris Pickeren stumbled across this article in a Minneapolis-St. Paul based magazine.


A Florida Panhandle Beach | Redefining the Tourist Town

A stretch of beach in the Florida Panhandle offers the most refreshing and original change of pace in American tourism.

Nine years ago in these pages, I wrote about the tiny town of Seaside, Florida, one of the most charming destinations in all of the Sunbelt. Nearly a decade later, I returned to Seaside to see how being “discovered” had ruined it; this is Florida after all.

Seaside was created in the early 1980s by a visionary developer, Robert Davis, who owned a tiny plot of Gulf Coast land on a thinly developed stretch of the Florida Panhandle. His goal was to build a community designed along early twentieth-century values, a pedestrian-oriented town with traditional architecture, narrow streets, small lots, and a square ringed by merchants.

It worked too well. Seaside’s allure was so profound that after the buzz got out, property values skyrocketed and a majority of its homes were built by affluent Southerners who use the town as a second-home community. This is where tourism comes in.

With a small full-time resident base, Seaside’s homes sat empty much of the year. Renting them to visitors for a day, week, or month became a way to keep the town busy and its merchants thriving, as well as to defray some of the costs of ownership for homeowners.

By the early 1990s, Seaside was nearly built-out and thriving, and Walton County took note. This was a tourism model that had a lot of originality: no high-rises, freeways, or strip malls—it had real originality in a Florida context. Other developers began to follow Seaside’s model—the most notable being the massive paper concern St. Joe Company, the largest Panhandle landholder. It began to develop the land surrounding Seaside into a town called Watercolor.

Seaside’s vision was made real by a foresighted “new urbanist” town planner Andres Duany, whose Miami-based DPZ Architects boomed following Seaside’s success. Not long after Watercolor took root, DPZ laid out Rosemary Beach—a few miles east along the coast—with the same small-town, pedestrian-friendly approach, but with a striking West Indian/New Orleans design palette. Rosemary Beach is nearly complete and DPZ’s next act is the visually stunning, stark-white Alys Beach nearby, destined to be the most environmentally sustainable community in Florida.

What this stretch of the Panhandle (known by its marketing moniker, the Beaches of South Walton) offers is a visitor experience completely at odds with the standard Florida template. It is quiet, relaxed, and aesthetically beautiful. The landscape is unsullied, the sunsets not blocked by vast stretches of condominiums and billboards.

Walton County’s beaches of powdery white sand are annually ranked as the best in the continental United States. There are scores of interesting restaurants that meld the bounty of the Gulf of Mexico with the culinary influences of the Deep South and nearby New Orleans. Among the scattering of small towns along Highway 30A are scads of small galleries and boutiques that have sprung up to serve the tourist trade. Golf courses are popping up as well.

Finally, the small new-urbanist towns of south Walton County may well be the very best family vacation destination in North America. It’s a place that promotes a languid pace, togetherness, and low-intensity pleasures such as walking on a beach or strolling to get ice cream. And after too many vacations crammed into pricey or dodgy hotel rooms, the space and flexibility of a home—large or cottage-sized—is a rare pleasure.

The real question for visitors is where to stay. For my money, Alys Beach is too early in its development to be a destination, it’s more of a construction site. Seaside is lovely and feels mature, showing signs of wear and use. Visitors will surely spend time here because of its compelling mix of retail and dining.

But the two spots I’d focus on are Rosemary Beach and Watercolor. (Watercolor’s down-the-road sibling, Watersound, set among dunes and sea grasses, has the most stunning locale of the new-urbanist towns, but it feels quiet and isolated by comparison.)

Watercolor is best suited to tourists wanting the widest range of services and amenities. Its inn, beach club, free bikes, canoe rental, tennis courts, and kids’ center with child care, plus a large infrastructure and staff, make it the choice for visitors who want to feel taken care of. It offers a wide array of stylish and comfortable accommodations, from hotel rooms to one-bedroom condos to multibedroom homes. Its Fish Out of Water restaurant is a regional star.

Watercolor is quite vast and offers various neighborhoods with different atmospheres, private parks, and swimming pools. Rates fall as you move away from the beach and into the outer reaches. The town’s off-season promotions tend to be more aggressive than its neighbors’.

Rosemary Beach is currently my favorite town in south Walton County, but it’s for a more independent-minded visitor. The town’s best asset is its design. This is truly one of the most visually alluring man-made places I have ever visited. The architecture is sensational, the vistas charming—it’s an aesthete’s feast.

But Rosemary Beach’s hotel is not yet open, its shopping and dining is no match for Seaside, and I found its merchants brusque and unwelcoming when we visited at Thanksgiving (I found the same at Seaside, but not at Watercolor). But there are beautiful clay tennis courts, high-design swimming pools, quiet pocket parks, and a neighborly vibe. It feels like a real small town, albeit full of $50,000 cars and the idle affluent. There is more privacy than at Seaside and more charm than at Watercolor. Rosemary Beach has that je ne se quoi.

The residences at Rosemary Beach are either small carriage houses or multibedroom homes. Though there is a strict exterior design code, interior appointments are more idiosyncratic. Be sure to look closely at the online interior photos of the rental home you are considering, because you will spend a lot of time there and if it’s not to your taste you may be unhappy. Finally, each is someone’s home, so don’t be surprised to see family photos and mementos about. Ours was homey in every respect, we arrived to clogged drains and many burned-out light bulbs that required a ladder to change.

Rosemary’s small commercial center is still developing and is less honky-tonk and more upscale than Seaside’s. Wild Olives gourmet market is a great place to stop for a bite, but avoid the indifferent fare at the Summer Kitchen. In a year or two, expect a near doubling of the town’s retail base, but for now you will inevitably head down the road to eat and shop.

The new-urbanist movement has resurrected a historic style of living and is trying to make it work in a modern context. There is no place in America where it is as widely expressed as this collection of small towns in Walton County, Florida. Here, it’s no experiment anymore, but a wildly successful manifestation of a new vision of Florida tourism. And it gets better every year—2008 will be no exception.

Dining Out
The Walton County dining scene is quite extraordinary for an area with such a low population density. But it’s the right crowd, I guess. Though not detailed below, longtime upmarket favorites Criolla’s (Grayton Beach), Café 30-A (near Seacrest), and Fish Out of Water (Watercolor) are recommended as well.
Bud & Alley’s Taco Bar: Seaside’s premier restaurateurs have opened an authentic Mexican taco bar with great drinks and incredibly tasty soft tacos. Perhaps the best lunch by the beach in the region. Seaside, 850-231-4784
Fonville Press: A charming, iconic coffeehouse and reading room in the developing town of Alys Beach. Music some evenings.
Hurricane Oyster Bar: A bright and casual spot for Southern/New Orleans seafood, including great barbecue shrimp, smoked meats, and fresh Gulf seafood. Its Sunday evening shrimp boils are renowned. Grayton Beach, 850-231-0787
Picolo’s: A kooky, wildly decorated local fave with a small menu of seafood and dishes with a Southern slant. (No credit cards.) Great service, very loud. Grayton Beach, 850-231-1008
Stinky’s Fish Camp: A casual roadhouse with superb Cajun, Creole, and seafood specialties. (No credit cards.) Santa Rosa Beach, 850-267-3053
Seagrove Beach Market Café: This dinerlike space at the back of a mini-market is the place for crisp fried local seafood, fresh grouper, and po’boys. Great gumbo in the evening. Seagrove Beach, 850-231-5736

Strategies
When to Go: Peak season in the Panhandle is summer, not when Midwesterners would likely visit. Fall and spring have the nicest weather, and only midwinter temperatures ever get chilly, with highs typically in the 50s and 60s. Gulf of Mexico waters are comfortably swimmable from May to October.
Getting There: Quick Northwest Airlines connections via Memphis will get you to Ft. Walton Beach or Panama City airports in as little as four hours from MSP. Both airports are a snap, but Panama City has a slight edge in usability and access to south Walton. A rental car is a good idea for excursions, outlet shopping, and roaming between the small towns along Highway 30A.
Learning More: The Beaches of South Walton offers a comprehensive tourism information packet, well worth the call because the area is thinly chronicled in travel guidebooks. 800-822-6877

Lodging
Seaside: Book homes through the Cottage Rental Agency, 800-277-8696
Rosemary Beach: Rosemary Beach Cottage Rental Company, 888-855-1551
Watercolor: Watercolor Vacations, 866-426-2656

Things To Do
This is not an area of “attractions” per se, but a few things are worth an extra effort.
Grayton Beach State Recreation Area: Annually ranked as one of the best beaches in the United States, this state park is just a short bike ride from Watercolor and boasts stunning dunes, pristine coastal vegetation, and cottage rentals. 850-231-4210
DeFuniak Springs: An inland town, about a half-hour north of Seaside, and the winter home of the renowned New York Chautauqua. The community boasts Florida’s best-preserved small-town collection of Victorian homes, a charming historic hotel, and one of only two perfectly round lakes in the world.
Silver Sands Factory Stores: A nicely turned-out outlet shopping village about a half-hour west of Seaside in the tourist town of Destin. 850-654-9771


February 2008
By Adam Platt