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"It's gone from kind of an upscale retirement community focused heavily on golf to more of a small town," Lauretti says. There are six golf courses and two marinas, and clubhouses that cater to separate communities — two new phases on the 6,500-acre (2600-hectare) island have recently been marketed. The prevailing style of the roughly 3,800 neighboring houses features large gables and verandas, with porticos, pediments, and glossy interiors.

In contrast, Lauretti's own house is "unlike pretty much any other house here." He says he was once told "straight-up" by a review board member that he would never vote for approval. During review, Woods went to the trouble of hiring a consultant architect who had previously advised the review board.

Lauretti and Woods also took the unusual effort of appearing with a scale model before the seven-member body, which is appointed by the Landings Association's board of directors. Since construction was completed, Lauretti has received one "mean-spirited, insulting" letter regarding his house, but he has also gotten inquiries from others who like it and want to incorporate similar elements. He shrugs off the approval process as not too difficult. Woods, however, views the approval process as a struggle representing something greater — a presupposition against anything different and modern, implemented and reinforced by lay people who have no special design expertise.

It's easy to say: "if you don't like a neighborhood's restrictions, don't build there." However, it can be difficult to find a place with the necessary freedoms if one wishes to build in an existing community.

Trends in Neighborhood Voices

In her 2003 book, The Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel points to a dramatic rise in municipal review boards, which spun off into the neighborhood covenant police. She writes that from 1970 to 2002, the number of U.S. housing units governed by an association board leapt from 1 to 17 percent, including condominiums and cooperatives.

"The biggest area of conflict is over architecture and land use," she writes. "People protest their neighbors' paint colors, their plants, their window frames, their kids' play equipment. We increasingly treat aesthetic differences as pollution. Ten years ago, 83 percent of American towns had some sort of design review, and three-quarters of those regulations had been passed since 1980. There's no current count, but the number has grown."

Woods views narrow code restrictions as an insidious trend based largely on unwarranted fears of a drop in property values. "Basically the architectural codes, at least in this particular place, were meant to restrict so that there would be a kind of neotraditional esthetic... they're trying to eliminate anything that would be unique or creative... they just don't really want houses to stand out at all," Woods says.

He adds: "I think that the average homeowner is daunted by the review board requirements and doesn't really have the skills to be able to work around or with the restrictions that are provided."

Process of Design and Approval

In the case of Moon River House, the high degree of collaboration between designer and owner began when Lauretti sketched his ideas and only later looked for a designer to realize them.

"I wanted to build a modern house that had a lot of glass that really played heavily on the merits of the exterior environment," Lauretti says. "[Woods and I] started to talk, and it was clear that he was a bright guy who understood what I was trying to do and was willing to work with it." Although the design is a "long evolution" from the concept Lauretti had drawn, his concepts are clearly visible in the completed house.

The Landings' architectural guidelines and review procedures span over 40 pages, but other U.S. communities are even more restrictive. The Landings' guidelines, admirably, enforce tree-canopy preservation and respect for community areas. They also ban over-sized satellite dishes, wacky postboxes, and untoward lawn "statuary." The community zealously guards against tourist trappings and emphasizes it is a place to live, not to vacation.

The guidelines also prohibit six design features that — had Woods not sought variances — would have killed his design. Forbidden characteristics include: flat roofs; cantilevering on the roofs, decks and kitchen; unarticulated, "minimalist" surfaces inside and out; exposed metal on the windows, storefront, and brise-soleil; absence of trim and shutters; and absence of plantings around the base of the house.

It's interesting that the guidelines also contain the following caveat: "The overall impact of a home design involves issues of taste and judgment that cannot be completely reduced to measurable standards of size, setback, roof pitch, etc. A home may meet all the statistical criteria but be unacceptable ... if in the judgment of the architectural review board, its overall aesthetic impact is unacceptable." But what lies beyond the pale of "acceptable"?

To ease approval of Moon River House, Woods focused on the section of the code that states: "proposed improvements [shall] 'blend' with existing structures so that the entire area is attractive and complementary."

The relative isolation of the lot, part of its appeal, also worked in their favor, Lauretti says. "If there was going to be... debate about the merits of the house, I think being at the perimeter [of the neighborhood] is good," he adds. "The lots next to me were empty and we're kind of on a peninsula — I think ['context' is] pretty open to interpretation at that point."

The Landings board eventually voted in favor of the design. Nevertheless, it's instructive to recall the words of Brenda Case Scheer, dean of the college of architecture and planning at the University of Utah, who produced a 1993 survey on the influence of municipal review boards.

"All over the country, in every state and most cities," Scheer writes, "adventurous design is being smoothed out or blocked outright. At issue here is not the freedom of the 'prima donna' architects, but the potential of the city, of any planned environment, to be a sharp and stimulating space."

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Lisa Ashmore is a freelance writer based in Atlanta and former managing editor of the monthly architectural journal, DesignIntelligence.

Moon River House, designed by Tim Woods, a lone modern house in a neotraditional community. Photo: Wayne C. Moore A typical neotraditional house of "The Landings on Skidaway Island" gated community. Photo: Courtesy Tim Woods The south elevation of Moon River House sports aluminum sun screens, smooth stucco walls, and cantilevered concrete terraces. Photo: Wayne C. Moore The living area has a cantilevered hearth and hanging chimney. Toward the back: steel and translucent plastic movable office storage walls. Photo: Wayne C. Moore Kitchen with sliding aluminum screens to conceal the scullery. Photo: Wayne C. Moore View through the kitchen to the marsh at the front entrance. Photo: Wayne C. Moore Steel, glass, and travertine stairs to the upper terrace are balanced by steel and translucent plastic movable office storage walls. Photo: Wayne C. Moore Clerestory at the entrance hallway with aluminum louvered sun screens. Photo: Wayne C. Moore   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.