A Florida Panhandle Beach | Redefining the Tourist Town

But the two spots I’d focus on are Rosemary Beach and Watercolor. (Watercolor’s down-the-road sibling, Watersound, set among dunes and sea grasses, has the most stunning locale of the new-urbanist towns, but it feels quiet and isolated by comparison.)

Watercolor is best suited to tourists wanting the widest range of services and amenities. Its inn, beach club, free bikes, canoe rental, tennis courts, and kids’ center with child care, plus a large infrastructure and staff, make it the choice for visitors who want to feel taken care of. It offers a wide array of stylish and comfortable accommodations, from hotel rooms to one-bedroom condos to multibedroom homes. Its Fish Out of Water restaurant is a regional star.

Watercolor is quite vast and offers various neighborhoods with different atmospheres, private parks, and swimming pools. Rates fall as you move away from the beach and into the outer reaches. The town’s off-season promotions tend to be more aggressive than its neighbors’.

Rosemary Beach is currently my favorite town in south Walton County, but it’s for a more independent-minded visitor. The town’s best asset is its design. This is truly one of the most visually alluring man-made places I have ever visited. The architecture is sensational, the vistas charming—it’s an aesthete’s feast.

But Rosemary Beach’s hotel is not yet open, its shopping and dining is no match for Seaside, and I found its merchants brusque and unwelcoming when we visited at Thanksgiving (I found the same at Seaside, but not at Watercolor). But there are beautiful clay tennis courts, high-design swimming pools, quiet pocket parks, and a neighborly vibe. It feels like a real small town, albeit full of $50,000 cars and the idle affluent. There is more privacy than at Seaside and more charm than at Watercolor. Rosemary Beach has that je ne se quoi.

The residences at Rosemary Beach are either small carriage houses or multibedroom homes. Though there is a strict exterior design code, interior appointments are more idiosyncratic. Be sure to look closely at the online interior photos of the rental home you are considering, because you will spend a lot of time there and if it’s not to your taste you may be unhappy. Finally, each is someone’s home, so don’t be surprised to see family photos and mementos about. Ours was homey in every respect, we arrived to clogged drains and many burned-out light bulbs that required a ladder to change.

Rosemary’s small commercial center is still developing and is less honky-tonk and more upscale than Seaside’s. Wild Olives gourmet market is a great place to stop for a bite, but avoid the indifferent fare at the Summer Kitchen. In a year or two, expect a near doubling of the town’s retail base, but for now you will inevitably head down the road to eat and shop.

The new-urbanist movement has resurrected a historic style of living and is trying to make it work in a modern context. There is no place in America where it is as widely expressed as this collection of small towns in Walton County, Florida. Here, it’s no experiment anymore, but a wildly successful manifestation of a new vision of Florida tourism. And it gets better every year—2008 will be no exception.