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Chapelton is compelling not simply because it is new, but because it understands how a town should meet the countryside. These streets, greens, allotments, and garden fronts do not stop abruptly at the field’s edge. They taper, frame, and negotiate it, giving the settlement a clear form while keeping the Aberdeenshire landscape present in everyday life.
That is a subtle design achievement. The 2012 development framework described a site shaped like a natural bowl, open to the east with outward views to the North Sea, and called for the plan to follow the contours of the land, preserve views, avoid unnecessary cut and fill, and devote around 40% of the settlement to open space. In Chapelton, that framework shows up not as spectacle, but as structure: greens where daffodils can announce the season, shared growing spaces, lanes and streets that feel settled into the topography, and buildings that make a village edge feel both urban and rural at once.
The larger planning lesson is that good urbanism is often about transitions. Between town and field, house and garden, square and street, private life and public life, Chapelton suggests that continuity can be every bit as powerful as contrast.
All photos: @chapeltonlife
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#chapelton #chapeltonnewtown #aberdeenshire #aberdeen #scotland
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One way to judge a neighborhood is by asking whether someone can grow older there with pleasure, dignity, and company.
Hendrix Village was conceived not only as a college town attached to Hendrix College, but also as a place that could attract retirees seeking both daily sociability and intellectual stimulation. DPZ’s plan distributed squares and greens across the site and framed the town as an extension of campus life and Conway life at once.
Shade, porches, picket fences, shared courts, and generous sidewalks matter not just because they look good, but because they support a long horizon of belonging. The happiest image in this set may be the last one. A resident, fully at ease, standing by rockscapes she created prompting everyday interactions. Sometimes that is the clearest proof that the design is working.
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#hendrixvillage #thevillageathendrix #hendrixcollege #conwayar #arkansas
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Jindee is interesting not only for where it sits on the coast, but for how deliberately it turns climate into urban form. These streets, verandahs, garden walls, street trees, and shaded footpaths do more than look beautiful. They make outdoor life comfortable, extend the hours of social life, and give the neighborhood a daily rhythm shaped by breeze, shade, and light. The project site is defined by natural limestone ridges running to the Indian Ocean, and the plan was conceived to respect that landform rather than flatten it away.
That is what makes Jindee feel instructive. The public realm is not treated as leftover space between houses, but as the place where coastal living is actually practiced, from a morning coffee on the porch to a walk beneath the trees to an evening stroll as the lights come on. Jindee emphasizes beauty, harmony, and a strong village community — living areas are encouraged at the front, verandahs are integral, and garages move to the rear so the street can belong more fully to people.
The larger planning lesson is that good neighborhood design is often a matter of calibration. When buildings, planting, frontage, and streets are tuned to climate and topography, a place can feel relaxed without being loose, and memorable without relying on spectacle. Jindee’s long gestation and ambition to set a benchmark for Australian urban planning make that achievement all the more notable.
Credit for all images: @jindeelife #repost
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#jindee #jindeelife #jindalee #perth
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A place like Habersham works because its social life and its environmental logic are doing the same job at once. In the video by @tonyhousing , what comes through is not just charm, but calibration: porches set close enough for greeting, streets scaled to slow movement, and a public realm that feels settled into the Lowcountry rather than imposed on it.
From the beginning, Habersham was planned to preserve 73 acres for parks, common areas, and natural drainage basins, with marsh buffers, mature vegetation, and narrower paved streets helping runoff soak and filter back into the landscape. DPZ’s plan also used a broad mix of building types and street sections so the town could feel varied and authentic without losing coherence.
Good town planning is not only about where buildings go. It is also about how a place handles water, shade, habitat, and neighborly encounter all at once. Habersham remains a strong reminder that urban form can be both socially generous and ecologically precise.
Video #repost from @tonyhousing
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#habersham #beaufortsc #beaufortcounty #lowcountry
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At the end of a plan’s timeline, the real question is not how much got built, but whether the original discipline still holds. Windsor’s North Village suggests that it can. As the community’s final phase takes shape, progress reads less like an add-on and more like a careful continuation of the larger civic and landscape order. The result is not novelty for its own sake, but completion with intention.
What makes the North Village especially compelling is the way growth is being tied to ecology. Within the 47-acre plan, more than 26 acres are devoted to parks, greens, and islands, and nearly 10 acres to water, with trails and boardwalks linking the Village Green to the Oak Pantheon and direct access to the Indian River Lagoon. Framed by the Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge and the Historic Jungle Trail, this phase extends Windsor by making landscape structure, not just architecture, do more of the urban work.
For planning and design, that is the interesting lesson here. A mature place still has room to evolve when its framework is strong enough to absorb change, deepen its relationship to the land, and finish well.
Video #repost from @windsorflorida
Video: Owen McGoldrick Architectural Photography
Rendering: IF Studio and NQS Creative
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#windsor #windsorflorida #northvillage #verobeach
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What people notice first at Alys Beach is the whiteness. What is easier to miss, and perhaps more important, is the discipline behind it.
Alys Beach is a reminder that strong places are not only designed through individual buildings, but through rules of repetition, restraint, and civic composition. Narrow passages, courtyards, fountains, gardens, and the town center’s green and amphitheater work together to make the public realm feel calm, legible, and memorable. Over time, that consistency has allowed the town to host not just daily life, but a cultural life as well, from gatherings in its central spaces to events like Digital Graffiti and the 30A Wine Festival.
The deeper planning lesson of Alys Beach is that when the framework is clear enough, architecture does more than create an image. It creates a setting for ritual, orientation, and shared experience, one that feels distinctive not because it is loud, but because it is so carefully edited. That framework also works with the landscape, preserving dunes and northern wetlands while treating civic space as an amenity in its own right.
That enduring clarity is also a testament to Khoury Vogt Architects, the Town Architects and our collaborators, whose stewardship of the plan and design has helped sustain Alys Beach’s remarkable coherence over time.
Read the BBC Travel feature at the link in our bio.
Photos #repost from @bbc_travel , courtesy of @alysbeach
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#alysbeach #30a #southwalton #waltoncounty
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🌷Spring at Carlton Landing is less a season than a shift in public life. The pop-up shops reopen, lighter clothes return, and the walk to the lake becomes part errand, part ritual, part invitation to stay out a little longer.
Warm weather brings the town’s social edges back into focus: boardwalk commerce, shaded streets, everyday encounters, and a lakeshore that feels woven into the life of the place rather than pushed to its edge. Along Lake Eufaula, Carlton Landing pairs shops, restaurants, greens, civic amenities, and lake access within a coherent town fabric, while the Pop-Up Shops on Water Street create a small-scale seasonal economy for residents, guests, and local makers.
For DPZ, good urbanism is not only about permanent buildings, but about creating the framework for recurring life – spring weekends, casual strolls, local vendors, and the simple pleasure of seeing a town come back outdoors.
Video #repost from @carltonlanding
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#carltonlanding #lakeeufaula #oklahoma #eufaulaok
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#repost from @purebirmingham 🌷
“The air smelled like wildflowers as my sister and I stepped out the front door. Spring had finally shaken off the last of winter’s chill, and the whole town seemed to glow with new life. Trees swayed gently, dressed in soft green, and the sidewalks were sprinkled with little yellow dandelions.
“We didn’t have a plan – just a walk, like when we were kids. She pointed out one of her favorite cafés at Hamilton Row, and I teased her about how she always noticed places with good desserts first. We laughed at a golden retriever pulling its owner down the sidewalk, tail wagging so hard it looked like it might take off.
“As we wandered, we stopped to peer into shop windows, admire painted murals on old brick walls, and smell the lilacs blooming near Shain Park.
“It was nothing special, really. Just a walk. Just @purebirmingham . But somehow, it felt like everything.”
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#purebirmingham #birminghammichigan #birminghammi #downtownbirminghammi
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The recent charrette in Clermont, FL, afforded the DPZ design team an opportunity to revisit the Southlake/ Aurora Apartments. These units have a Clermont address and are part of the Cagan Crossings neighborhood in the Four Corners community at the southern end of Lake County. Given that housing affordability was a major topic of the charrette discussions, the DPZ team was reminded of this apartment complex when a coffee barista and a restaurant server both mentioned that they rented in Four Corners, one of the most affordable areas in the region. The studios - 2br units in the Southlake/Aurora complex rent from $875 to $1,150 a month.
This two and three story 1990 DPZ project was partly funded by the State's tax-credit program and constructed with a modest budget of $27/ sf. The 700-dwelling campus is noteworthy because of how its layout helped organize its surface parking in enclosed courts and parallel on-street spaces. The result is a walkable public realm that provided the seed for subsequent apartment complexes designed by other architects that similarly define a pedestrian-friendly street network. Ultimately, the resulting 6,000-unit community justified the development of a mixed-use town center adjacent to US27.
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#cagancrossings
#clermontfl
#DPZCoDesign
#affordablehousing
#newurbanism
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Last month DPZ was pleased to spend a week in Central Florida conducting a planning charrette for the City of Clermont. The five days served as our kick-off for a dual commission to update the City's comprehensive plan and its first ever form-based zoning code. It is a unique opportunity, as usually these two assignments are addressed at different times, and by different firms.
The well attended event featured two DPZ teams led by Lizz Plater-Zyberk and Marina Khoury, respectively. Residents, city staff, business owners, and other stakeholders filled our council chamber studio to discuss a multitude of ideas and possible solutions over the course of the week. Working in real time the design and consultant team members, meanwhile, were busy drawing and crafting text in response to their concerns. Ten opportunity sites were the subject of detailed illustrative plans that showed residents how their community could have more road connections to alleviate traffic woes, a more activated lakefront, a wider range of housing types, more walkable nodes, and an overall greater sense of place throughout the four city quadrants. Thank you, Clermont!
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#clermont #comprehensiveplan #formbasedcodes #walkablecity #DPZCoDesign
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Spring in Westhaven shows what time and a good plan can do for a neighborhood. Flowering trees, tulip beds, lakefront vistas, rocking-chair porches, and a well-used fountain all read as one connected landscape rather than separate “amenities.” After two decades of growth, the streets, parks, and water edges have matured into a continuous sequence of outdoor rooms for daily life.
Behind these scenes is a master plan that treats greenways and lakes as the armature of the community – turning drainageways into promenades, orienting homes to shared open spaces instead of driveways, and giving bikes, walkers, and porch-sitters front-row seats to the Tennessee landscape. DPZ’s collaboration with Southern Land Company continues to demonstrate how long-term design decisions can choreograph seasons, social life, and nature on the same blocks.
Credit for all images: @westhavenslc
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#westhaven #westhaventn #franklintn #williamsoncounty #tennessee
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READ: A Conversation with Sikes Ragan, the Visionary Behind the Village of Cheshire
The Village of Cheshire is a health-oriented mountain community situated on a wooded, sloping site east of Asheville, NC. The village street patterns and architectural character emulate beloved area neighborhoods, particularly Albemarle Park and Montreat Village. The master plan is dedicated to fostering a strong sense of community in celebration of founder Sikes Ragan’s family and the land where they operated a summer tennis camp for many years.
“For Sikes, The Village of Cheshire isn’t just a development; it’s a family legacy. The namesake “Cheshire” lovingly memorializes Sikes’ grandmother, a powerful influence in his life. The land itself was home to his father’s tennis camp in the 1970s. While others pressured his father to sell the property, his father held out, believing his son would one day create something special there.”
Read more at the link in our bio.
Image credits: The Village of Cheshire
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#villageofcheshire #blackmountainnc #mountainvillage #mountainretreat #northcarolina
