Village inspired by Seaside rises on Pacific coast

Early in this decade, doubters wondered whether an upscale new urbanist beach town could succeed in an economically depressed part of the Washington coast that’s soaked by nearly 80 inches of rain a year. Yet since 2004, Casey Roloff and his Seabrook Land Company have managed to sell 120 houses, at prices as high as $3 million, in the Seabrook development, a 3-hour drive west of Seattle.
On May 27, Seabrook was the subject of largely favorable feature articles in both the Tacoma News Tribune and The New York Times. The most negative observation The Times could make about Seabrook was that some visitors see it as too perfect — the same inverted compliment often bestowed on Seaside, Florida, where houses have fetched an average of $1.4 million apiece during the past year or so.
Designed by Portland architect Laurence Qamar, Seabrook has found its niche. The approximately 100-acre development offers tightly clustered traditionally styled houses about a five-minute walk from the beach. Its first retail business, a seafood café called Cafe Tashtego, opened in February. A neighborhood market is under construction, and a boutique hotel is also planned.
Eventually Seabrook will have 330 single-family houses, plus a range of shops and services that people can reach on foot, by bicycle, or by car. Above its Main Street shops will be lofts and condominium units.
By midsummer, the downturn in residential real estate nationwide had slashed home sales on the coast of Washington and Oregon by 40 percent, yet Seabrook’s sales were still holding steady at around $17 to $18 million a year, according to Roloff. Since July, though, the country’s financial turmoil has made an impact on Seabrook as well.
In late September Roloff told New Urban News “it looks like now we are on pace for about 17 [house] sales and around $11 to $12 million in sales” in 2008. That’s a big drop from the 33 houses sold in 2007, but Seabrook has made up for some of the reduction by selling oceanfront houses that command top-of-the-market prices. “It’s easier to sell a $2 million oceanfront house than a $500,000 to $600,000 home off of the ocean side,” said the 36-year-old developer.

Creating an attraction
For decades, many Seattle residents ignored Washington’s Pacific coast and vacationed instead on the coast of Oregon, where the scenery — punctuated by “haystack” rocks that jut abruptly out of the water — is more spectacular. Roloff believed the relative unpopularity of the Washington coast was caused in part by the lack of a pleasing built environment.
Thus, after acquiring land near the hamlet of Pacific Beach, in one of the most topographically attractive areas of the Washington coast, Roloff set about creating a walkable resort community that would have the kind of appeal he had seen at Seaside. Larry Davis, brother of Seaside developer Robert Davis, bought one of the first lots. “Robert flew out and kind of blessed the place,” Roloff says. “He’s my ultimate mentor,” says Roloff. “I’m a little guy. We both had shoestring budgets.”
To shape the landscape architecture, he hired Stephen Poulakos — who was responsible for the landscape of Rosemary Beach, Florida — as director of town development. Roloff’s own crews are building the houses.
“Seabrook is quite well executed with a wide range of house types,” says marketing consultant Todd Zimmerman of Zimmerman/Volk Associates. “The cottage courts are among the best I’ve seen, with very nice amenities — an outdoor wood-burning fireplace, a petanque piste, etc.” Petanque, Zimmerman explains, is “a game of boules from Provence, played on a packed-earth surface,” which he says is “very popular at Seaside.”
The Tacoma paper noted that “to settle an appeal of his development plan, Roloff had to agree not to build on the beach side of the highway until he had first sold and built 100 homes on the opposite side.” Roloff reached that milestone last spring and recently broke ground on a neighborhood called Northwest Glen, which is closer to the ocean.
Northwest Glen houses are grouped around a “green alley,” which Qamar compares to an English Mews — it also borrows ideas from “shared space” streets (see article on page 11). Houses front a pedestrian path, or esplanade, on the exterior of the block, and many have ocean views. The alley is fronted by carriage houses and it includes trees, a formal plaza, and four mid-block walkways that lead from the alley to the esplanade (see plan at right). Carefully grouped “utility corrals” mitigate some of the unsightly features.
The houses in Seabrook aspire to be “green,” using materials such as reclaimed wood flooring. “Our first LEED-certified house was just finished,” says the developer, who earlier built houses in the New Urbanism-influenced communities of Bella Beach and Olivia Beach, Oregon.
The development has attracted buyers who are “the top 1 percent of income earners,” Roloff says. Small two-bedroom, two-bath houses start at $399,000. Three buyers at Seabrook previously owned properties in Seaside (where houses recently have sold for as much as $4.5 million) or at Rosemary Beach.  
Bikes abound. “There are a host of cruisers in a wide range of colors parked all over Seabrook, available for residents’ use,” Zimmerman observes.
So far, most dwellings have been second homes. “About half are in the rental house program,” Roloff says. “That’s really carried us. They can buy a house and rent it out 150 nights a year.”
East and south of the Seabrook acreage, Roloff has acquired another 200 acres. He expects to develop the eastern section as a village with a rural feeling, with larger lots, narrow oyster shell roads, and organic gardens and farms.
The southern expanse, which includes a quarter-mile of beachfront, is being targeted for the densest development, as a “great lodge with retail below to capture the unobstructed views of the ocean,” Roloff says. Altogether, the 300 acres may contain as many as 900 to 1,000 housing units.