The history of Rosemary Beach.

Rosemary Beach was not discovered. It was drawn. The 107 acres on the south side of Scenic Highway 30A that now hold the town's coral-toned stucco walls, cedar shake roofs, and pea-gravel courtyards were, in 1994, a stand of slash pine and scrub oak with a few interior dirt tracks. The town that exists today was master-planned in a single year by the husband-and-wife firm that had, fifteen years earlier, drawn the plan for Seaside — and in doing so, ignited the American New Urbanism movement. Rosemary was their follow-up.

The story of how this stretch of coastline became one of the most carefully-coded planned towns in the country runs through a Walton County realtor, a New York financial holding company that took its name from an ancient region of Greece, a Miami architecture practice founded by two Yale-trained classmates who had married each other, and a small carriage house that had to exist before any of the bigger buildings could be designed. It's also a story about what its developers chose not to copy from their famous neighbor — and what they thought a beach town should do that Seaside, the original, had not.

01 — Before the townThe land east of Inlet Beach

What is now Rosemary Beach sits at the easternmost end of County Road 30A, in unincorporated Walton County, on land that was historically part of the older Inlet Beach community. The coast here is the eastern edge of what locals call the Emerald Coast — a roughly 100-mile stretch of white quartz sand that drains down from the Appalachian Mountains, washes into the Gulf of Mexico, and gives the water its unusual translucent green tint.

For most of the twentieth century, the strip of land between Highway 98 and the Gulf along eastern Walton County was thinly developed coastal scrub, dominated by slash pine, sand live oak, saw palmetto, and the low, needle-leaved bush that gives this whole stretch of dune its name: Ceratiola ericoides, the Florida rosemary. The plant looks like the culinary herb and smells like it when crushed, but it isn't related — it's a member of the heath family (Empetraceae) that grows in the white “sugar sand” of back dunes and inland scrub from the Florida panhandle north into the Carolinas. It binds the dunes together. It's also, almost certainly, the reason this beach is called Rosemary.

The naming story has two parts and the town itself acknowledges both. The plant is the older claim. The more recent claim belongs to a realtor named Rosemary Milligan, who began acquiring parcels in this part of South Walton in 1974 and assembled much of the land that would eventually be sold to the developers of the town. The name carried from the land to the realtor and back to the development. Both attributions appear in the historical literature about the town, and the truth is probably that one reinforced the other — the plant named the place, the realtor consolidated the place, and the development named for the realtor returned the plant's name to the map.

The deeper history of this coast goes back well before any of these names. The Muscogee (Creek) and the Euchee used the bayous and the coastline of what is now Walton County for fishing, hunting, and trade in the 1700s and 1800s, well before the establishment of any of the coastal towns that exist today. By the time the modern road network arrived in the form of County Road 30A in the 1960s, the eastern stretch was still mostly undeveloped. Inlet Beach, just to the west of present-day Rosemary, was the larger pre-existing community.

02 — The precedentWhat Seaside had already proven

You cannot tell the story of Rosemary Beach without first telling the story of Seaside, the 80-acre town six miles to the west that is the reason Rosemary exists in the form it does. The land Seaside sits on was bought in 1946 by a Birmingham, Alabama, merchant named J. S. Smolian as a family compound. In 1978 his grandson, Robert Davis, inherited the tract; he wanted to develop it as a small town in the manner of the southern coastal places he remembered from before the era of strip malls and beachfront condominium towers.

Davis hired a young husband-and-wife team in Miami named Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. The two architects spent the better part of 1980 driving the back roads of the American South in a Honda Civic, photographing porches, town squares, picket fences, and street widths in places like Apalachicola, Charleston, and Savannah, looking for the dimensional and material vocabulary of a coastal southern town that worked. The Seaside master plan was the result. Construction began in 1981. The lots sold faster than anyone predicted, the architectural code held, and the town quickly became the case study in what came to be called New Urbanism.

In 1998, Paramount Pictures released a film called The Truman Show in which Jim Carrey plays a man who has lived his entire life inside a televised simulation. Director Peter Weir filmed almost the entire movie on location in Seaside. The town, with its tin roofs and white picket fences and absurdly perfect central square, was already what Weir was looking for; he did not need to build a set. The film made Seaside internationally famous. For everyone involved in planning the three towns that followed Seaside on this stretch of coast — Rosemary Beach (1995), WaterColor (1999), and Alys Beach (2003) — one of the design questions that was never far from the surface was how to avoid building another Seaside. Rosemary's answer was the most direct: a different reference set, a different colour palette, a different plan geometry, a different relationship between the house and the car.

03 — 1995The year the Rosemary plan was drawn

In 1995, the Rosemary Beach Land Company — a development arm of Leucadia Financial Corporation — assembled the 107-acre site and engaged Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company to draw a master plan. The company's president, Patrick D. Bienvenue, led the development. The planners were Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the Miami-based principals of DPZ.

Leucadia itself is a useful piece of context. The company was named for an ancient Greek island (modern Lefkada), in the manner of twentieth-century American holding companies that preferred opaque classical names to descriptive ones. It was reorganised in 1979, renamed Leucadia in 1980, and built out by Ian Cumming and Joseph Steinberg as a diversified holding company in the model of Berkshire Hathaway, with operating investments across financial services, real estate, manufacturing, and energy. In 2013 it merged with the investment bank Jefferies and the combined company is now Jefferies Financial Group. In the mid-1990s, when Rosemary was conceived, Leucadia was an aggressive value investor with a real estate development arm and a willingness to take long-cycle bets on planned communities. Rosemary Beach was one of those bets.

By 1995, Duany and Plater-Zyberk were no longer a quiet practice. They were the most-discussed urban planners in the United States. Fifteen years earlier, in 1980, they had drawn the master plan for Seaside; in 1992 they had co-founded the Congress for the New Urbanism, the professional organisation that would carry the intellectual movement forward; their urban codes were the technical apparatus that turned the New Urbanist argument into something a developer's lawyer could enforce. Rosemary was the firm's opportunity to do it again, on a similar stretch of Gulf coast, with the benefit of fifteen years of having watched what worked and what didn't at Seaside.

Leucadia's brief was explicit: build on Seaside's success, but don't repeat it. The result was a town that looks and feels different in almost every respect — darker, denser, more enclosed, more European, with hidden alleys instead of front-door streets and a colour palette pulled from the Caribbean instead of the Gulf Coast.

04 — The plannersAndres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk

Andres Duany was born in New York City in 1949 and grew up in Cuba until 1960. He took his undergraduate architecture degree at Princeton in 1971 and a master's at the Yale School of Architecture in 1974. Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in 1950, took the same path: Princeton 1972, Yale 1974. They met as undergraduates at Princeton and married in 1976. In 1977 they co-founded the Miami firm Arquitectonica, a Latin- modernist practice; in 1980 they left to found Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, the same year Robert Davis commissioned the Seaside master plan.

By 1995, when Rosemary was commissioned, DPZ had drafted town plans and form-based codes for more than fifty places; by Plater-Zyberk's 2001 Vincent Scully Prize and the firm's subsequent Driehaus Prize, the number was past 300. Plater-Zyberk became dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture in 1995, the same year the Rosemary Beach Land Company hired the firm; she served as dean until 2013, making the university the country's principal academic home of New Urbanism. The two have co-authored three books that became required reading in American planning schools: Suburban Nation (2000), The New Civic Art (2003), and Smart Growth (2007). The firm that drew the Rosemary plan was, in other words, at the height of its institutional authority — a mature design practice with a worked-out code-writing methodology being asked to apply it to a new site and a new architectural reference set.

05 — The four borrowed citiesSt. Augustine, Charleston, New Orleans, the Dutch West Indies

The Rosemary Beach Urban and Architectural Regulations — the design code that governs everything from the depth of a porch to the pitch of a roof to the species of plant in a front yard — were drafted after an extended study of four reference places. What all four share, and what the Rosemary code was attempting to translate, is a vocabulary of building developed for warm, humid, hurricane-prone coastal climates before air conditioning. Each of the four references gave the code a specific set of moves.

St. Augustine

St. Augustine, on the Atlantic side of Florida, was founded by the Spanish in 1565 and is the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the continental United States. Its early buildings were made from coquina — a soft limestone composed of compressed seashells, quarried on nearby Anastasia Island, which is workable when first cut and hardens as it weathers. Spanish builders used coquina in thick walls, often two to four feet deep, which absorb heat slowly and keep interiors cool through the day. Windows were fitted with rejas — turned wooden or iron grilles — and operable wooden shutters; together these elements managed light, ventilation, and storm protection in the era before plate glass. The Rosemary code does not require coquina (it would be prohibitively expensive to source today), but it requires the visual equivalent: a heavy, masonry-textured wall base; deep window reveals; functional shutters on every opening; and a thick, plaster-finished stucco that reads as mass rather than skin.

Charleston

The Charleston single house is a building type unique to Charleston, South Carolina: one room wide, with the narrow gable end facing the street, the long side running perpendicular into the lot, and a multi-storey roofed porch — the piazza — on the south or west side as the family's principal warm-weather living space. The type was developed in the eighteenth century in response to narrow colonial lots and brutal South Carolina summers; the piazza catches the prevailing breeze and the depth of the house maximises cross-ventilation. Many Rosemary lots are configured exactly this way: narrow, deep, with a piazza-equivalent porch on the southern side and the front door opening onto the porch rather than the street.

New Orleans

The French Quarter of New Orleans gave the code its colour and its balcony language. The Quarter's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Creole townhouses present a continuous masonry facade to the street, painted in deep saturated colours; the upper floors carry projecting balconies with wrought-iron railings; the ground floor opens directly onto the sidewalk through tall shuttered openings. Rosemary's town centre buildings — the mixed-use blocks around Barrett Square — borrow the Quarter's continuous-facade urbanism rather than the picket-fenced detached house typology of Seaside. The Rosemary palette of deep terracotta, ochre, soft blue-grey, and weathered white is a direct transplant from the French Quarter's colour vocabulary.

The Dutch West Indies

The fourth reference is the one most often cited and the most architecturally distinctive: the Dutch colonial Caribbean, primarily the islands of Sint Maarten, Saba, and Sint Eustatius. Dutch colonial building in the Caribbean produced a recognisable type — whitewashed masonry walls, a stepped or curved gable parapet at the roofline (the “Dutch gable”), tall shuttered openings, and a deep first-floor porch raised above the street on a stone base. The Rosemary Town Hall, completed in 1999, is the town's most explicit Dutch West Indies quotation: white stucco walls, stepped parapet, tall ground floor, deep porch. The parapet is the move that signals the reference most clearly, because the stepped gable is almost never seen in American vernacular building outside of the historic Dutch-colonial enclaves of the Hudson Valley and the Caribbean.

The code is built around what DPZ calls a Regulating Plan and twelve basic lot types. The Regulating Plan is a single annotated drawing that assigns each parcel in the town to one of the twelve types and fixes its setbacks, height limit, allowable porch geometry, and relationship to the street. The twelve types are the menu from which every individual building must be chosen. Within each type, the architect of an individual house has discretion — over plan, over interior, over many surface details — but the basic envelope and the relationship of the house to the street are set by the code. The Town Architect reviews every set of plans against the code before a permit is issued.

The Code is a protective document designed to preserve and enhance the quality of life of all individuals who live, work, and play in Rosemary Beach.

That last sentence is from the town association's own description of the regulations. The phrase “protective document” is worth pausing on. Most American zoning is permissive by default: you may build anything not prohibited. The Rosemary code inverts that. It is prescriptive by default: the building types are the only types allowed, and individual variation happens inside them. That kind of code only works if the people buying lots want the constraint — which, in 1995, was a real bet to make, and one Seaside had only recently proven could be made.

06 — The first buildingThe carriage house that started a town

Before the first family house in Rosemary was designed, the first building was. It was a carriage house: a small, two-storey detached structure with a parking bay below and a single rentable apartment above. Richard Gibbs, the architect Robert Davis had brought to Seaside as Town Architect in 1990, was invited six years later by the Rosemary Beach Land Company to take the same role at Rosemary. The carriage house was the prototype he and the team built first, before anything else.

The choice was not aesthetic. It was financial. The carriage house allowed an early homeowner to build the small back-of-lot structure first, rent the upstairs apartment to vacationers to defray the construction costs, and then build the larger main house on the front of the lot later as cash flow allowed. It also solved a practical problem the master plan had built in: every house in Rosemary parks in the alley behind it, not on the street in front. Each lot needed a covered parking structure off the alley anyway. The carriage house combined the required parking with a code-compliant rental unit, and gave the lot a finished back elevation that faced the alley.

The effect, if you walk Rosemary today, is that the alleys feel like secondary streets — not service ways — because they are lined with two-storey buildings that have their own front doors, their own colour schemes, and their own porches. The carriage house prototype, drawn before the master plan was even finalised, set the rule for what every alley in town was going to look like for the next three decades of construction.

The first two family residences in Rosemary Beach were completed in 1997 on East Water Street. By 1999 the Town Hall was finished, and by the early 2000s Barrett Square and Main Street were lined with built work in every direction.

07 — The five-minute walkPedestrian-first, by code

The single most consequential decision in the master plan was the alley system. Every house in Rosemary Beach parks at the rear, off a dedicated alley. The street-side or boardwalk-side of each lot is freed entirely for the front door, the front porch, the front garden, and the relationship between the house and the public realm. Cars are welcomed into the town — the plan never pretended otherwise — but they are deliberately hidden from the pedestrian environment.

The pedestrian network on top of that is denser than the road network. In addition to the streets, the plan carries continuous wood boardwalks, gravel paths, and grassed lanes between blocks. The intended walk time from the furthest house to the town centre is five minutes. The intended walk from the furthest house to the beach is shorter. There are two formal beach access points rather than a continuous beach road, which preserves the dune frontage as residential lots. The boardwalks step over the dunes rather than through them, on raised wood structures.

Rosemary's plan replaces grid-locked traffic with encouraged pedestrian traffic, urban sprawl with community interaction, and single-use neighborhoods with workable streets that combine shops, restaurants, and galleries with houses.

The result is that the public spaces in Rosemary — the greens, the squares, the boardwalks — carry most of the social weight of the town. Houses are smaller than they would be on a comparable un-coded lot, because the porch counts as outdoor living room and the green at the end of the lane counts as front yard. The street is not something to be tolerated; it is the thing the house is built around. That is the New Urbanist idea, expressed at the level of an individual house plan.

08 — The public realmThe greens, the Town Hall, and St. Augustine Green

The pedestrian network is anchored by a sequence of public spaces: the East and West Long Green Parks, which run the length of the town; Barrett Square at the centre, the principal plaza; the Kingston Parks; St. Augustine Green, which is the town's primary gathering and performance space; and the Western Green at the foot of Main Street, which sits between the town and the main beach access point. Each of these was drawn into the original master plan. Each was set aside as common land before any of the surrounding lots were sold.

The Town Hall was completed in 1999. It is, deliberately, the town's most explicit Caribbean reference: white stucco walls, a stepped Dutch West Indies parapet roof, tall first-floor ceilings, deep porches, dark shuttered openings. It is the building that finishes the visual argument the rest of the town is making. The architectural team designed it to be the reference building — the one private architects could look at and understand what the Rosemary code was trying to produce.

A second important civic building, the Rosemary Beach Owners Center, was added later and carries an entry tower tall enough to be visible from Highway 98 to the north. The Owners Center includes the performance space at St. Augustine Green that hosts the town's public concerts and outdoor films. If you have ever sat on a lawn chair at St. Augustine Green on a Wednesday in July listening to a string quartet, you are sitting in a space that was specifically drawn into the 1995 plan as the principal gathering room of the town.

09 — The poolsFour water rooms, four references

The Rosemary plan provided four community pools, each named for a Caribbean reference: Coquina, Barbados, Cabana, and Sky. The pools were a quietly important piece of the development logic. Because so many of the lots in Rosemary do not face the Gulf directly — the master plan deliberately preserved dune frontage as residential rather than putting a road along the beach — the community pools became the secondary water amenity for the town's inland-facing lots. Every lot in the town is within a short walk of at least one of them.

The Coquina Pool, in the southeast quadrant of the town, is the oldest and the most architecturally direct: a single-depth basin with a triangular entrance pavilion housing restrooms and changing facilities. The Barbados Pool, on the south side of 30A west of downtown, was designed by Douglas Patrick Luke, a Barbadian architect — the only one of the four with a literal Caribbean author. The Cabana Pool, on the north side of 30A, was designed as the family pool, with a children's play area attached. The Sky Pool is the most recent and the most ambitious: a rooftop pool on the north side of the town centre with a motorised retractable glass roof, allowing year-round use regardless of weather. The four pools together carry forward the Caribbean reference set at the scale of the amenity programme, not just the building code.

10 — The Pearl HotelAnchoring the town centre, 2013

For the first fifteen years of its existence, Rosemary Beach functioned without a hotel inside the town code area. Visitors rented houses through the rental management programmes that grew up around the development; there was no traditional inn or hotel inside the town centre. That changed in August 2013, when The Pearl Hotel opened on Main Street.

The Pearl is a fifty-five-room boutique hotel designed by the New Orleans firm Trapolin-Peer Architects, with interiors by Duncan and Miller Design of Dallas. It is the tallest building in the town — five storeys plus a peaked clock tower visible from the beach and from Highway 30A. The exterior is white-stucco-on-masonry in the Dutch West Indies vocabulary the Town Hall established, with black-and-white-striped awnings, pointed turrets, and a deep covered gallery at street level housing an outdoor dining room. The hotel occupies the prime corner at Main Street and East Water Street and functions, in the master plan's terms, as the anchor of the town centre. Its arrival is a reminder that Rosemary's build-out was not finished in 1999. The town has been growing through its code for thirty years now, and the design-review apparatus that enforces the code has not changed in any structural way since 1995.

11 — Rosemary vs. SeasideTwo towns, two arguments

The most interesting thing about Rosemary Beach is that it was designed by the same firm that designed Seaside and was deliberately drawn to be its opposite in almost every formal respect. Seaside is rigorously orthogonal: the master plan is a near-perfect grid, with radial streets fanning into a central square. Rosemary's plan is much less regular; the streets bend and dogleg with the contours of the dune line, and Barrett Square sits at the meeting of several non-rectilinear axes.

The palette is the second contrast. Seaside is bright: clapboard siding, pastel paint, tin roofs, white picket fences. The visual register is American Gulf Coast vernacular — the kind of house a Florida family might have built for themselves in 1925. Rosemary is darker, heavier, more masonry-driven, with deeper colours pulled from the Caribbean rather than the Gulf. The visual register is deliberately not American. Standing on Barrett Square at dusk feels closer to an evening in Cartagena or Willemstad than to an evening in a Florida fishing town.

The third contrast is the car. Seaside's plan was drawn in 1980, before the developers had a full sense of how many cars a successful beach town would ultimately attract. Many of its homes park in front, on the street. Rosemary, drawn fifteen years later with the benefit of having watched Seaside fill up, sent every car to the alley. That single decision — the alley as a primary infrastructure, rather than a service afterthought — is the most visible difference between the two towns and the one most often copied by the planned communities that have followed.

The fourth contrast, the one that takes longest to notice, is the density. Rosemary's lots are smaller and the houses are closer together than at Seaside. The master plan calls for roughly 400 home sites on 107 acres, with mixed-use buildings of up to four storeys at the town centre. The result is a town with a much more enclosed, urban feel than Seaside — almost a small-scale European resort town transplanted to the panhandle, rather than a remembered American village.

The fifth contrast is cultural and harder to put into words. Seaside, partly because of The Truman Show, has become a place that people visit in order to look at it — the central square is the destination, and the buildings around it have the self-aware quality of being photographed. Rosemary, partly because of the alley system and the more enclosed street geometry, reads as a place that has interior rooms and exterior rooms but does not have a single central stage. You wander it rather than survey it. That is partly a design choice and partly a consequence of being designed second.

12 — Hurricane Michael, 2018What the code was actually for

On 10 October 2018, Hurricane Michael made landfall on the Florida Panhandle near Mexico Beach, about 25 miles east of Rosemary Beach along the coast. The storm came ashore as a Category 5, with maximum sustained winds of 161 miles per hour and a 14-foot storm surge. Michael was the most powerful hurricane to strike the Florida Panhandle in the recorded history of the region. The National Hurricane Center had spent the previous days projecting landfall somewhere along an arc that included Rosemary Beach itself, and mandatory evacuation orders were issued for Walton County. Total damages in Florida exceeded $18 billion. Mexico Beach, to the east, lost most of its built fabric.

Rosemary Beach was on the western, weaker side of Michael's eyewall and was spared the catastrophic damage that flattened the built environment further east. But the storm was the first opportunity in the town's history to see what the architectural code actually did in the face of a major hurricane. The features the code had borrowed from the Dutch West Indies, St. Augustine, and Charleston — elevated masonry bases, deep eaves, functional shutters, thick stucco-on-masonry walls, steeply-pitched roofs that shed water and resist uplift — are not decorative. They are the elements of a building tradition developed over four centuries in coastal places hit by serious hurricanes on a generational rhythm. The town's built fabric came through Michael substantially intact: boardwalks and dunes took damage, a handful of roofs and walls needed work, but the masonry town centre and the great majority of the coded houses held. The historical references the code drew on were working references.

13 — RecognitionWhat the design field made of it

Rosemary has been included in the same conversation as Seaside and Alys Beach as the canonical examples of New Urbanism on the Gulf Coast. DPZ describes it on the firm's own project list as “arguably one of [our] best-liked communities,” and the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art has run study tours of the three towns as a single itinerary. Architectural Digest included the town's main street in a national survey of beautiful main streets in the United States. Twenty-five years after the first family homes were completed on East Water Street, the town reached effective build-out, but the architectural code is still in force; the Town Architect role still exists; new construction and significant renovations still go through design review against the original 1995 regulations.

14 — What you can still seeA walking guide to the original 1995 plan

Most of the choices made in 1995 are still visible if you know where to look. The Town Hall is the clearest. Stand at Barrett Square, looking south toward the water, and the Town Hall is the white-stucco building with the stepped parapet that anchors the square. The carriage-house prototype is the easiest building type to find — walk down any alley north or south of Main Street and the small, two-storey, garage-and-apartment structures lining both sides are almost all variations on the original Gibbs design.

The colour palette is everywhere and rewards a slow walk. The deep coral of the trim against the soft ochre of the stucco; the pale aqua-on-white of the Caribbean-derived shutter colours; the weathered cedar of the boardwalks turning silver-grey in the salt air. The plant palette, also prescribed by the code, holds up the architectural one: native sand live oaks shading the streets, Florida rosemary on the dunes, palmetto and sea oats in the public greens.

The five-minute walk holds up too. Stand at any house in the town and time yourself to the beach. It will be a short walk. Stand at any house and time yourself to Barrett Square. It will be a short walk. That is the artefact of a master plan drawn to a maximum dimension rather than to a property line.

15 — CodaWhat Rosemary inherited and what it left behind

Rosemary Beach inherited from Seaside the proposition that an American beach town could be designed from a code, built from a pattern book, and held to a single architectural standard for a generation. It inherited the idea that the planner, not the individual house architect, is the principal author of the place. It inherited the principle that public space — the square, the green, the boardwalk — matters more than any private house.

It left behind the American vernacular. The Rosemary code took DPZ's methods and applied them to a non-American architectural source — the colonial Caribbean — and showed that the method was portable. That portability is the line that runs from Rosemary forward to Alys Beach, the third of the planned 30A towns, where DPZ would later return with another developer and choose Bermudian whitewash and courtyard architecture as the next reference set. The story of how 30A's three planned towns argue with each other across a few miles of road is still, in 2026, the most interesting argument in coastal American planning.

Three towns, three reference sets, one design firm. Seaside is American: clapboard, picket fence, tin roof. Rosemary is colonial Caribbean: stucco, parapet, deep porch. Alys Beach is Bermudian: whitewashed mass walls, courtyard plan, white roofs designed to collect rainwater. Taken together, in sequence, along a single county road, they are the most concentrated argument for form-based coding anywhere in the country.

The next instalment in this series will turn west, to Alys Beach. The one after that will go back further still, to where the whole conversation began: Seaside, 1980, a Honda Civic full of architects' cameras, an 80-acre tract of inherited family land, and a young Cuban-born architect named Andres Duany.

Further readingOn this site

• The Rosemary Beach events calendar — what's happening this week at Barrett Square, the Western Green, and St. Augustine Green.
• The history of Alys Beach — the 2003 hybrid of Bermudian whitewash and Antiguan courtyard plan, and the only town in the country built entirely to a Category 5 hurricane standard.
• The history of Seaside — the 1981 town that started everything: Robert Davis, the Honda Civic research trip, and the master plan that launched American New Urbanism.
• All histories — the full series on the planned towns of 30A.
• About South of 30A — how this calendar is kept current.

SourcesPrimary references for this article

• Rosemary Beach Property Owners Association — Our History. Primary association source for the 1995 founding, the carriage house prototype, the 1997 first homes on East Water Street, and the 1999 Town Hall completion.
• Rosemary Beach POA — Our Architecture. Source for the design code structure, the twelve lot types, and the Dutch West Indies, St. Augustine, Charleston, and New Orleans references.
• Rosemary Beach POA — Amenities. Source for the four community pools (Coquina, Barbados, Cabana, Sky), the racquet club, and the fitness center.
• Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company — Rosemary Beach project page. Primary planner's record: 105 acres, 800 residential units, 55,000 sq ft retail, 1995 design year, alley-system rationale.
• Rosemary Beach, Florida — Wikipedia. Source for the Leucadia Financial Corporation development structure, Patrick D. Bienvenue's role, the Inlet Beach land history, and the Rosemary Milligan naming attribution.
• Andrés Duany — Wikipedia. Source for Duany's 1949 birth, Princeton 1971, Yale 1974, Arquitectonica 1977, DPZ 1980, Congress for the New Urbanism 1992.
• Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk — Wikipedia. Source for Plater-Zyberk's 1950 birth, Princeton 1972, Yale 1974, deanship of the University of Miami School of Architecture 1995-2013.
• Britannica — Duany and Plater-Zyberk. Source for the firm's history, the 300+ town plans completed, and the partnership's major published works.
• Seaside Institute — Richard Gibbs. Source for Gibbs's 1990 appointment as Seaside Town Architect, his subsequent seven-year role as Town Architect at Rosemary Beach, and his RISD background.
• Seaside, Florida — About. Source for the 1946 Smolian land purchase, the 1978 inheritance by Robert Davis, the 1981 construction start, and the Truman Show cameo.
• Seaside, Florida — Wikipedia. Cross-source for the Seaside founding history and the New Urbanism precedent.
• Trapolin-Peer Architects — The Pearl Hotel, Rosemary Beach. Architect's record for the 55-room hotel opened August 2013, including the peaked clock tower, the deep covered gallery, and the corner location at Main and East Water.
• Hurricane Michael — Wikipedia. Source for the 10 October 2018 Category 5 landfall, the 161 mph sustained winds, the $18 billion Florida damage figure, and the proximity of landfall to Rosemary Beach.
• National Weather Service Tallahassee — Hurricane Michael 2018. Primary meteorological record for the storm.
• St. Augustine Old City — Spanish Colonial Architecture. Source for the coquina construction, the two-to-four-foot wall thicknesses, and the rejas and shutter language of Spanish colonial St. Augustine.
• Charleston single house — Wikipedia. Source for the side-piazza building type, the gable-end-to-street orientation, and the cross-ventilation logic of the southern coastal urban house.
• Institute of Classical Architecture & Art — Alys Beach, Seaside and Rosemary Beach: New Urbanist Communities. Source for the inclusion of all three towns in the canonical New Urbanism conversation.
• Ceratiola — Wikipedia. On Florida rosemary (Ceratiola ericoides), the dune plant after which the town is most likely named.

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