Seaside — The Original New Urbanist Town

How a Family Retreat Became the Birthplace of New Urbanism

Seaside's land history starts decades before the town did: Robert Davis's grandfather, J.S. Smolian, bought 80 acres near Seagrove Beach in 1946 as a summer retreat for employees of his Birmingham department store. Davis inherited the property in 1978 and, in 1981, began developing it into a town — starting with two houses, one street, and a single beach pavilion. To design it, Davis hired Miami architects Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who toured small Southern towns with cameras and tape measures before drafting a master plan, largely complete by the mid-1980s, built around a walkable street grid, a town center within walking distance of every home, and a code-based design review rather than conventional zoning. A 1984 Southern Living feature is widely credited with turning Seaside from a local curiosity into a national one.

That code is the reason Seaside looks the way it does. A Town Architect position, established in 1983, still reviews every building for compliance: house colors must be approved and tested against an on-site mock-up panel, native landscaping is required in place of front lawns, street-facing porches are mandated for several building types, and — as co-founder Daryl Davis has put it — "there are no chain stores, only Mom and Pop operations." Seaside's success in applying those rules at town scale is why it's routinely credited as the first real-world example of New Urbanism, a movement formalized with the founding of the Congress for the New Urbanism in 1993 — and why Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Seaside Chapel architect Scott Merrill are all Driehaus Prize winners. The same postcard-perfect grid also caught Hollywood's attention: Peter Weir shot 1998's "The Truman Show," starring Jim Carrey, almost entirely in Seaside, using the real town as the fictional "Seahaven Island" — a connection the town and its neighbors still mark on filming anniversaries.

Seaside's town center, Central Square, holds the businesses that give the code meaning in practice: Modica Market, a gourmet grocery founded in 1989 by Charles Modica Sr.; Bud & Alley's, a beachfront restaurant open since 1987; Great Southern Café, chef Jim Shirley's Southern-coastal kitchen; the independent Sundog Books; and a cluster of Airstream food trucks known locally as Airstream Row. From the square, boardwalks lead to the Gulf past nine public beach-access pavilions, each built to a different architect's design — among them Tupelo (Ernesto Buch), Pensacola (Tony Atkins, with its rotunda and pelican weathervane), and Odessa (Roger Ferri) — a rare case of civic infrastructure treated as individually commissioned architecture rather than a repeated standard design. That combination of walkable design, film-location fame, and a genuinely small footprint (Seaside is only a few blocks across) has made it one of 30A's most recognized names and a fixture of the corridor's vacation-rental market; as of mid-2026, active Zillow listings for the Seaside/Santa Rosa Beach area spanned roughly $340,000 to just under $20 million, reflecting everything from older cottages to newer Gulf-front homes, though no single verified median price for Seaside alone (distinct from the broader Santa Rosa Beach market) was available at publication. As with the rest of 30A, individual lots along Seaside's short stretch of oceanfront generally fall in FEMA's VE flood zone closer to the water and AE further inland — confirm any specific parcel through the Walton County Property Appraiser or FEMA's Flood Map Service Center rather than assuming a single zone for the whole town.