Butter-Pecan Builder

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Deed Back. He began by studying the project for nine months. Clearly, he had to know his market: Who would buy second homes, and what kind? Equally clear was the rise of environmentalism, so Hanslin walked the land with planners and ecologists, analyzing soil, water, slopes and wind patterns. Then the roads and utility lines went in, following not a predetermined grid of homesites but the natural terrain. "You spend more time on the drawing board and a helluva lot more in the field," he says, "but you end up doing the least amount of developing—and spend the least amount of money disturbing things and putting them back."

A total of 1,647 house sites of one to five acres were planned, plus 400 clustered units—a high enough density to yield the owners a good return on their investment, but too high to preserve open space and forests. Hanslin got around the problem by grouping his sites in eleven petal-shaped villages that he calls, a bit cutely, "special places." More important, he requires every buyer to deed back to Eastman from 10% to 50% of his land (depending on "what creates the most advantageous site") as permanent open space. In this way, almost 30% of the land will be preserved. It is one of the best conservation ideas since cluster planning; it also sells as easily as, well, butter-pecan ice cream. Some 475 plots have already gone for $5,300,000.

Whether Hanslin's ideas will work to create a community remains to be proved, but a staff of enthusiastic young architects and planners are putting in long hours to see that they do. Having organized Eastman, they now are at work in a former warehouse in Manchester, N.H., to design Hanslin's next project, at a still secret location. On a long table stand flats of organically grown bean sprouts. Even more striking are wall charts tracing the development of dozens of bygone religious and idealistic communities, the failures as well as the successes. Each detail of their way of life is marked, from food raising to sleeping arrangements.

Why so much esoteric research? Hanslin senses that property buyers now want to control their immediate environment, and he suspects that this "ego approach" will supplant the "hedonism communities" of recent years. Whether this is true is largely speculation, but Hanslin likes to speculate. "There is so much room for improvement in the residential area," says he. "There are so damn many challenges everywhere."