A Florida Panhandle Beach | Redefining the Tourist Town

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.