The Florida model

Two resorts hint at Padre Island's future

By Nick Nelson Caller-Times
January 22, 2006

WALTON COUNTY, Fla. - Driving through this place can be surreal.

For miles, an unnamed, one-lane state highway snakes through tall pine forest. Round one corner, past a sign bearing the word "WaterColor," and you enter a town where every cottage, shop and shed - even the tiny post office - is meticulously rendered in Southern-style architecture in earthen and pastel tones. The lawns are like putting greens, children play and laugh on the spotless sidewalks and residents nod hello as they cruise by on golf carts or bicycles.

It's as if you've driven onto the set of "The Truman Show," and in a way, you have. The 1998 movie that stars Jim Carrey as an unwitting television star in a picture-perfect town was filmed only four blocks from WaterColor in a community called Seaside.

The neighboring storybook villages are the face of the new Gulf Coast resort community. In these communities, there are no high-rises or gaudy neon lights. The architecture is top-notch, the environment family-friendly.

These towns are also, possibly, the future of Padre Island.

WaterColor served as the model for a resort community called BeachWalk Village that is planned for just south of the Padre Island seawall. Both WaterColor and BeachWalk Village were designed by the same New York City-based architectural firm, Cooper, Roberston & Partners.

For the other end of the seawall, the architects borrowed from a different Walton County resort - Sandestin - to design a village-style resort called Balli Village to be built just south of Packery Channel.

To see WaterColor and Sandestin is to glimpse what developers envision for Padre Island. The Caller-Times visited the Florida resorts and the nearby city of Destin to find out how these areas have balanced beach access and resort development. The Caller-Times also visited Galveston and South Padre Island - two coastal cities often cited by beach access advocates as examples of what not to do with a city beach. The four-part series begins today with an in-depth look at WaterColor and the Village at Baytowne Wharf.

An investment, an escape

About five times a year, 17-year-old Brianna Caldwell makes the six-hour road trip from Atlanta to South Walton County, where her parents own a cottage in WaterColor.

"Sometimes we'll come for a whole week during the summer," she said. "And sometimes we'll come during the school year over a long weekend."

On a brisk January afternoon, she and her best friend, Bailey Bush, are the only two within sight on the 1,400 feet of snow-white beach that WaterColor borders. "It's the slow time of year," Caldwell said.

Lynn Nesmith, a former writer for Architecture magazine and a Walton County resident who works part time giving tours of WaterColor to visiting journalists, said typical homeowners are in their early to mid-40s, are wealthy and live within driving distance of the community, usually coming from cities such as Atlanta, Birmingham, Ala., or Nashville.

"They look at a home here as an investment," she said. "They rent it out through the WaterColor rental program and come here on vacation for a couple of weeks out of the year."

The 499-acre community is owned and operated by the Jacksonville, Fla.-based St. Joe Company, traded on the New York Stock Exchange as "JOE." St. Joe broke ground on WaterColor in 1999 and began selling lots and condominiums in 2000. (It didn't hurt that the subsequent sell-off coincided with the largest housing boom in America's history.) Today, most of the more than 1,100 lots have sold and more than 450 homes are already built.

Architectural firm Cooper-Robertson didn't design every building in WaterColor. Rather, it drew up the plans for the community's layout, designed a couple of buildings to serve as architectural models and then wrote the guidelines that direct future building.

"The city and the residents of Corpus Christi said they wanted the best, so I went to the best," said Paul Schexnailder, a partner in Gulf Shores Joint Venture, the company that plans to build the resort on Padre Island. Cooper-Robertson also designed the Disney headquarters and studios in Burbank, Calif., Battery Park in New York City and several other communities in Florida.

The homes built at WaterColor are individually designed but have many common features - large porches, abundant windows and wide eaves - of the Southern coastal vernacular. Blueprints for new homes must be approved by a design review board.

In 2004, the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit center for real estate development education and research, chose WaterColor for the 2004 Awards for Excellence, generally considered the highest industry honor of its kind.

Current prices for WaterColor lots range from $610,000 for a site set in the woods to $3.5 million for a beachside lot. Homes range from $1.3 million to $5.7 million, and rental rates range from $1,650 to $6,615 a week, depending on size, style and location.

Common ground

WaterColor wraps around a rare coastal dune lake and borders 1,400 feet of Gulf beach just east of a state park.

The proposed site for $300 million BeachWalk Village on Padre Island includes about 90 acres that will border a 1,300-foot length of beach, just south of the island's seawall and just north of Padre Balli County Park.

WaterColor's is set back from the ocean behind the natural dune line. Long boardwalks that make minimal impact on the dunes take pedestrians from the resort to the beach and vice versa.

Similarly, BeachWalk Village is set behind the dune line and would have four dune walkovers between the community and the beach.

WaterColor has one 60-room inn, two restaurants, a spa, tennis courts, a high-end daycare, and a town center lined with mixed-use buildings with retail shops on the first floor and condominiums above.

The configuration of BeachWalk Village will be similar, even down to the 60-room inn. Near the inn will be a town center with first-floor shops and residences above. In total, BeachWalk Village would have about 400 residential units, with some condos but mostly single-family cottages. In WaterColor, there are no guarded security gates so the restaurants and shopping areas are open to the public. Shexnailder said the same would likely be true of BeachWalk Village.

Mixing old with new

Twelve miles west of WaterColor, just outside the city limits of Destin, Fla., Sandestin resort sprawls across 2,400 acres. It spans the entire width of the Destin Peninsula, so it borders sugar-white Gulf beach to the south and the Choctawhatchee Bay to the north. It includes four golf courses and 1,450 housing units in 30 neighborhoods.

Vancouver-based Intrawest Corp. (NYSE: "IDR") bought Sandestin in 1998 and soon after began a 10-year, $400 million redevelopment project of the property.

Part of that redevelopment was the construction of the 28-acre Village at Baytowne Wharf, a pedestrian village patterned after an old-world fishing town with a mix of residential and retail development.

Most of Sandestin is open to guests and residents only, but the Village at Baytowne Wharf is open to the public. To get to it, you drive to Sandestin's main entrance, stop at a security gate and tell the guard you are headed for Baytowne Wharf. The guard produces a parking pass and offers directions. The entire exchange lasts about nine seconds. Public parking at the village is free.

At the center of the village are more than 40 shops, restaurants and entertainment venues, bearing names such as "Graffiti & The Funky Blues Shack" and "Another Broken Egg Cafe." There are also clothing boutiques, jewelry shops and art galleries. These are surrounded by upscale condos, a small inn and the towering Grand Sandestin, a white, plantation-style hotel and estate that overlooks the Choctawhatchee Bay. Next door is a 65,000-square-foot conference center.

Just as WaterColor inspired BeachWalk Village at the south end of Padre Island's seawall, Baytown Wharf was the model for Balli Village, which is planned for the north end of the seawall just south of Packery Channel.

Balli Village would cover about 60 acres and border the Gulf on one side, Packery Channel on another and Lake Padre on another. The "village" area of Balli Village, with specialty shops and a spa, is planned for a corner near the north end of the seawall. Most of the residential development would be low-rise condominiums, though there would also be a mix of single-family cottages and beachside development as tall as 15 stories.

The land just south of Packery Channel would be excavated for a marina, and channels would be dredged through the property so than nearly every building borders either beach or water. A hotel similar in size to the Grand Sandestin would anchor the resort at its northern point near Packery Channel's south jetty.

Similar to Florida

Though the twin resorts would be similar to their Florida counterparts, Schexnailder said the Padre Island projects would be uniquely "designed to fit the community and the area."

Paul Milana, a partner at Cooper-Robertson and lead architect for the Padre Island projects, said each site presents a set of new conditions. In the case of the island, one of those conditions was an almost incessant wind.

"The wind out at Padre Island is a huge issue," he said. "We had to think about how the prevailing winds were going to affect how people live. A courtyard building type is one we've been keen to develop there because a courtyard has a protected space in the middle, and you can grow plants you couldn't otherwise grow because there is a space that is protected by the wind."

Milana said that unlike WaterColor or Baytowne Wharf, the Padre Island projects would be adapted because of their proximity to a major population center. He said he was stunned when he first visited the city at how little development had occurred along the coast.

"You fly to Corpus Christi and you see that there's this huge city," he said, "and that it's only 30 minutes from the airport to this (development) site, and you say, 'What's been happening here for the last 100 years?'"

The big trade-off

Gulf Shores Joint Venture plans to build BeachWalk village on its own, and Intrawest has signed a letter of intent to build the $500 million Balli Village simultaneously as phase one of a 300-acre, $1.5 billion resort. The resort would form a horseshoe around the seawall - with BeachWalk Village at the south end of the horseshoe and Balli Village at the north.

The conundrum for the developers is that the adjacent beaches are currently open to traffic. Gulf Shores will ultimately develop the land whether traffic is allowed on the beaches or not, but the resort communities currently planned for the area are not economically feasible without pedestrian-only beaches, Schexnailder has said. He insists the stance isn't a threat or an ultimatum but simply an economic truth. "Unless the vehicles are taken off the beach, the resort just won't be sustainable," he said.

In South Walton County, vehicular access is the price locals have paid to bring resort development to the area, and the locals have mixed feelings about that.

Just a mile west of WaterColor is Grayton Beach, a quaint and aging beachside town that is one of the few places in the county where vehicles are allowed on the beach.

One recent morning on Grayton Beach, George Heynes maneuvered his black Suburban onto the sand as his dog Brandy rode shotgun. Heynes, 82, has been driving onto the county's beaches since 1949, when he moved to the area.

No longer allowed

"We used to be able to drive the whole beach," he said. "One time I drove all the way to Destin. But they started just restricting it." The driveable beach is about a half of a mile long.

A sign next to the beach's entrance advises that only four-wheel-drive vehicles with permits are allowed on the beach. Heynes said the cost for a permit has gone up from "zero to a hundred dollars" during the last two decades and is only available to Walton County residents.

On the same morning and the same beach, Carrie and Eric Berger watched as their children, 7-year-old Steven and 4-year-old Caroline, played in sand that looks like snow. The couple moved to nearby Destin after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their New Orleans townhouse, and they believe cars have no place on the beach.

"It's surprising that they take one of the prettiest beaches in the country and allow cars to drive on it," Carrie Berger said, adding that safety was also a concern.

The opposing views mirror those of Corpus Christi residents, who are faced with the decision of restricting beach for the first time.

The business community has largely come out in favor of restricting the beach to accommodate the resort. The Corpus Christi Chamber of Commerce, the Corpus Christi Association of Realtors and the Padre Island Business Association have supported at least some restrictions.

Other groups oppose vehicular restrictions of any kind. Most vocal has been the recently formed Beach Access Coalition, which started a petition drive to overturn the City Council's decision in October to ban traffic in front of the seawall. The council rescinded that ban in December to make way for a broader restriction, and the BAC has said it will start a new petition if the council passes a new ordinance.

A "Truman Show" town, it seems, comes at a price, and the council is expected to vote in the coming weeks whether it is a price worth paying.

Contact Nick Nelson at (361) 886-3678 or nelsonn@ caller.com

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