When Paramount Pictures wanted a location for its new Jim Carrey film, “The Truman Show,” which is about a man who goes through life without realizing that his entire world has been scripted for television and that his friends are actors and his hometown is a set, they chose Seaside.
“The character lives in a town where everything looks picture bright and a little too perfect,” said Tom Phillips, a spokesman for Paramount.
Although the movie crew left town months ago, some of the touches are still here: plastic topiary blowing in the wind, posters for a nonexistent movie house, an awning for a hotel that isn’t a hotel, even a phony office building emblazoned with the Big Brotherish name Omnivision Industries. No one seems to care or even notice.
Probably no 80-acre patch of America has been more heavily styled, or scrutinized, in recent years than Seaside, the picturesque resort development in the Florida Panhandle that started a small-town planning revolution when it was established in 1981. Envisioned as the kind of town a well-mannered Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn would appreciate–where every house was required to have a porch and where bicycle paths and picket fences were written into the urban code–Seaside is growing up and taking on a life of its own. And it is not all in the script.
A building boom on the west side of town is threatening to wrench Seaside’s intentionally homey scale out of whack. The original tin-roof, one-story beach shacks nestled under spreading magnolia trees are beginning to be dwarfed by towering and turreted clapboard houses that are being built right up to the maximum square footage allowed. And while all of this is surely a sign of success, some of the old-timers (if a 15-year-old town can have old-timers) view the big houses as a bit over the top.
Looking out from the rooftop of her townhouse at the center of Seaside, Mary Moore Hoover is well perched to appreciate these contradictions. Hoover, a child psychologist from Columbia, Tenn., has been coming here since 1986. Her new house straddles the worlds between what Seaside imagined itself to be–an old-fashioned small town by the shore–and what it is becoming: a rather exclusive resort community.
As she sips cognac on one of the four balconies of her four-story house called Maison des Volets (House of Shutters), she admits that hers is no modest bungalow: it commands the second-highest vantage point in town. (Her architect, Alex Gorlin, built himself a house at the highest point.) Its relative grandness gives her an occasional twinge of nostalgia for her old house and a touch of guilt. “But mine is a real year-round house,” she said. Though she could almost be called one of the town’s founding beachcombers (she and her brother bought one of the original washed-out-blue summer bungalows in 1986), four years ago she commissioned Gorlin, a Manhattan architect, to build a 3,000-square-foot house on Ruskin Place, a square lined with townhouses that have shops and galleries–mandated by code–on their ground floors.
Ruskin Place is the town’s urbane hub, and Hoover’s house is big for a reason. The center of town was meant to feel substantial, with edges that were humbler, smaller. The new big houses on the fringe are within the letter of the code, but many feel they defy its spirit.
“They just aren’t the real Seaside,” Hoover said. “I think of them as Johnny-come-latelies–a lot of money but no vision.”
Charles Warren, a former town architect, who has built three houses in Seaside, agrees that the new buildings are relatively “colossal,” at 1,800 to 2,200 square feet, compared with the older bungalows, which start at 600 square feet.
“When people were spending $20,000 for a lot, they just built shacks with no expectations,” Warren said. “But now that they’re spending $300,000, they want to build a house that’s at least that valuable, and they’re looking for every loophole in the code to get their houses to be as big as possible.”
Now that all 298 home lots have been sold, land values in Seaside have skyrocketed, said Christopher A. Kent, a broker and real estate counselor, adding that the increase had been about 25 percent a year since 1982, compared with roughly 5 percent elsewhere in the Panhandle. Houses for sale start at $500,000 for anything over 1,500 square feet and rise “briskly and quickly from there,” Kent said.
To a lot of people in the Southeast, “Seaside is like the Hamptons,” Gorlin said.
“People spend hours getting there,” he said. “They feel more enlightened if they come to Seaside. And they come looking for something beyond a little town full of shacks on the beach.”
Hoover comes to Seaside often but is planning to move here permanently. Seaside houses run the gamut of easy-living styles, from Vineyard cottage to Charleston plantation, and hers is one of the more theatrical.
