Bermuda White

credit: Josh Gibson

A decade before the Gulf hurricanes of 2004 and 2005 threatened to change coastal home construction forever, Jason Comer was already imagining enduring architecture for the storm zone. “Aesthetics meshed with sustainability,” he calls it. And that turns out to be an accurate, if woefully insufficient, description of Alys Beach, the apparition in white rising under Comer’s direction on northwest Florida’s increasingly opulent beachfront.

For better than a half-century, Comer’s Birmingham, Alabama-based family had vacationed on these Panhandle beaches. “We saw hurricanes come and go,” says Comer. As a result, they gained respect for the quality of design and construction that environment demands. In the late 1970s, the family company acquired a stretch of real estate straddling Scenic Highway 30-A, east of Destin. They watched as neighboring projects — first Seaside, then Rosemary Beach — astounded real estate know-it-alls by privileging design and sense of community over Gulf-front views and gated exclusivity, and by charging a premium for the experience. Seaside’s success, both as a real estate development and as a model for community design, helped give birth to the New Urbanism movement. New Urbanism argues for a return to older town design principles, approaches that have made walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods such as those in Charleston and Savannah more appealing than the car-centered suburbs and strip malls of America’s modern era.

In Seaside, New Urbanism also helped solve a double dilemma for coastal developers — the prospect of huge price drop-offs for lots without water views and the risks of building close to the water. Good design turned out to be the way to preserve safety and high value.

In exchange for moving off the beach and behind the protection of natural dunes, Seaside rewarded home owners with parks and plazas and streets and alleys that invited walking and biking. It was a true neighborhood with access to the beach instead of a collection of houses competing for ownership of it. By focusing community life a respectful distance from the winds and waves of the Gulf, Seaside buffered itself against storms through twenty hurricane seasons. And prices for Seaside homes deep in the development not only started at levels above those for houses at similar distances from the beach in nearby communities, but also they rose at faster rates.

None of this was lost on the family company founded by Comer’s grandfather. When it came time to build on their beach property, they turned to DPZ — Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., master planners of both Seaside and Rosemary Beach — to help them raise the bar for coastal design another notch. The result, Alys Beach, named for Comer’s grandmother, embraces New Urbanism’s principles of community building and adds a layer of environmental awareness, including awareness that living in this particular part of the world means coping with hurricanes.

When you build in such a place, says Comer, “it just makes good sense to build homes that even the severest storms can’t destroy. Why not build with the idea of these homes lasting 300, 400, 500 years?”

Had you heard about Alys Beach’s ambitions for durability only, and not glimpsed the first phase of its 600-unit master plan becoming reality along 30-A, you might have been prepared for compromise: Give Comer and company bonus points for imaginative engineering, and cut them slack if they have to sacrifice grace of form, right? But Alys Beach appears to be a no-compromise endeavor. In fact, Comer and his designers have to keep reminding people distracted by the architecture to notice the engineering.