The Celebration Chronicles

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.

  So far, they had done a good job of flattering this sadly uninformed consumer. Having established I was not her ideal client, Alice asked, a little curtly, if I would be favoring nontraditional furniture, too. Gail intervened to soften the tension. In England, she assured me, people are not obliged to choose between traditional and modern. They mix and match at will, and are comfortable with all sorts of combinations of taste. Happy eclecticism of this sort may not sit well with upscale American suburban living, but if the English condone it, then I should be able to rest easy with my choice. With that clarified, and with the uncertain promise that they would return at some later date to do business, they took their leave.

  I never saw them again and heard that they had packed up and left within the year, having overestimated the local demand for their services. Above all, it seems, they had misjudged the Celebration market. A month after Gail and Alice’s visit, a domestic cleaner called me, claiming that he often worked for them, but could offer me much lower rates if I employed him directly. A recent immigrant from the English Midlands, he was caught, like so many others, in the low-wage trap of a tourist economy, where jobs abound but a livable income is hard to come by. I would meet many such souls in the dollar-poor purgatory of Central Florida, including a teacher, freshly fired from an elementary school, who was now working as Winnie-the-Pooh in the Magic Kingdom for just under $6 an hour. Apparently, the coveted task of animating the famous bear for an hour is worth less than the price of a ticket for a Disney film of the same length.

  For professionals like Gail and Alice, the Great Divide between modern and traditional is their bread and butter, even as they seemed willing to stretch the definitions for an ornery client like myself. In the everbooming building economy of Orlando Metro—next to Las Vegas, the fastest growing city in the United States—this divide is clearly visible all across the busy landscape, flush with stucco-sheathed subdivisions, criss-crossed by the adobe walls of gated developments, and swelled by the clusters of vacation homes that ring the Big Three attractions: Disney World, Universal Studios, and Sea World. In step with the ethos of the preservation and environmental movements, much of the middle- to high-end housing built in the last two decades defers, in some outward show of respect, to a traditional, or at least a prewar look. There are few developers who do not pay lip service to the heritage formula of selling the trappings of tradition along with the conveniences of modernity. Celebration had taken this formula to another level, offering a traditional townscape along with an advanced technical infrastructure from the age of yahoo.com. As one sales brochure put it, “Except for all the newfangled, modern stuff, it’s just like the town your grandparents grew up in.”

  Celebration’s facades attract all the attention, and so initially I was more curious about the interiors. During my first weeks in town, before I had started visiting resident’s houses, I spent a portion of each day inside the town’s model homes to see what an ideal interior was supposed to look like. Entering these houses was like boarding a suburban version of the ghost ship, the Maria Celeste—stocked and decorated as if a real family were living there and had evacuated in a great hurry. Framed family portraits sat on furniture tops, snapshots were magnet-hung on the fridge doors, books lay open on beds, Web sites were frozen on computer screens, a mud-stained baseball outfit was tossed on one bedroom chair, a majorette’s hat on another. In the larger model homes, marks of wealth and taste were flaunted—vast facsimiles of Gobelin tapestries stretched along the hallway, classical architectural drawings and hunting-dog portraits lined the walls; fine wines, cigars, old maps, oak panels, and legal tomes filled the study; and elaborate themes were evoked in the childrens’ bedrooms —Star Trek, Rainforest Botanist, Ballerina Russe, Noah’s Ark. In contrast to the tightly packed Reader’s Digest volumes and National Geographic issues found in the smaller houses, the shelves here were lined with upper-middle-brow reading material: John Steinbeck, Barbara Taylor Bradford, George Orwell, Louisa May Alcott, James Michener, Russell Baker, and the five-foot shelf of Harvard Classics. Elaborate flower arrangements and herbal bouquets set off a display of gourmet foods, lying in wait for the chef of the house, while luxurious oils and salts lined the bathtubs, anticipating the weary body. The Celebration rumor mill reported that these model homes had to be continually restocked, since visitors persisted in walking off with the pricey accessories. Minor acts of vandalism were also reported.

  These were not simply what builders call “twenty-minute houses,” designed to register an immediate visual impression for first-time visitors. They were intact living environments, with preselected taste and decor choices, and they lacked nothing except the presence of warm bodies. Market-researched and brand-approved, with advanced infrastructure and appliances from the likes of Honeywell, General Electric, and Kohler, these interiors were products of an industry that had defined personal taste through the precision science of focus groups and opinion polling. The same consumer science had selected the six housing styles adopted for the developer’s traditionalist offerings: Classical, “inspired by the gracious houses of the Old South,” and derived primarily from nineteenth-century Greek Revival architecture; Victorian, “whimsical and cheerful,” “asymmetrical and picturesque,” and drawing heavily on the pattern books of the nineteenth century; Colonial Revival, an “optimistic” commemoration of the popular 1920s–1940s style, and especially typical of traditional neighborhoods in Orlando and Tampa; Coastal, “stately and relaxed,” and based on Acadian and Low Country traditions of the southern Atlantic states; Mediterranean, the honeybrown twentieth-century Florida style with stucco and tile roofs; and French, based on the “simple and elegant” farmhouse architecture made popular by veterans on their return from the Great War in Europe.

  Consumer market research also lay at the origins of “neotraditionalism,” the preferred ethos and style of New Urbanism, the planning movement of which Celebration is largely a spinoff. When I queried Andres Duany, the charismatic, Miami-based figurehead of the movement, about this concept, he cited a slide presentation of a consumer study he attended in a Disney office building in the late 1980s: “It changed my life,” he declared with vigorous clarity. “My mind-set, my method of operation was born there.” The report, summarizing the results of eighteen years of annual research by the firm Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, was a fast and loose assessment of how boomer consumer attitudes had changed since their “outright rejection” of the “traditional values system” twenty years before.

  We are now developing an entirely new social climate in this country.… This new approach to life, which we call Neotraditionalism, is not a rejection of what came before, as the “Me Generation” values were. Rather, it is a synthesis of the best parts of the two previous value systems, combining the security and responsibility of the 50s with the individual freedoms and personal choice of the “Me Generation.” Consumers seem to be seeking a state of equilibrium, a balance between these extremes.5

  Duany recalled how the report was presented:

  They showed a photograph of a Victorian mantelpiece with a Braun alarm clock sitting on it. The neotraditionalists, they argued, might choose an old-fashioned room, but they wouldn’t buy a Victorian clock that has to be wound and might not be accurate. They would choose an up-to-date German clock. Moreover, the neotraditionalists would have modern plumbing and kitchens in their old houses. Now, a traditionalist would restore a Victorian bathroom, clawfoot tub and all, while a modernist would think it improper to live in a Victorian house.6

  Tom Lewis, vice president of Walt Disney Imagineering and one of the original members of the Celebration planning team, could not recall this report but acknowledged that a real estate study had been commissioned from the Robert Charles Lesser group (the country’s premier real estate valuation firm) when the team was looking at target markets for residential developments in the region. They also talked to a group of futurists about “consumer preferences in the nineties and into the next century,” and
conducted market research with visitors to Innoventions at EPCOT and through postal surveys sent to stockholders about the kinds of communities, lifestyles, and products they would want in a new town. The results clearly fed into the final conception of the town as a place with “old houses and new toys.”

  It’s not clear that this formula differs so radically from that espoused by the upwardly mobile in previous decades of the century. Didn’t all such homeowners want the outward marks of antique prestige while enjoying mod cons inside their homes? On the other hand, if this really was an accurate boomer profile, there was a visible history behind it. The epic 1960s’ revolts of boomer teens against a formulaic planet of canned laughter, plastic packaging, and cookie-cutter housing had spawned an ambivalent attitude toward mass-produced modernity. A good deal of the energy of these revolts was channeled into restorative causes like housing preservation and environmentalism, both valuing an undefiled past. But the legacy of the 1960s counterculture also gave birth to the idea that high technology could be utilized as a medium of personal freedom. This was the germ of the personal computer revolution in the West Coast subcultures that formed around Apple and fed, ultimately, into the brave new world of self-publishing on the World Wide Web. Here, then, was the Janus face of the neotraditionalist boomer: ever responsive to promises of self-liberation through high technology, and yet still ravenous for authentic, original stuff, untainted by mass commercialism. Celebration was designed as a happy hunting ground for people who fit this consumer profile.

  MAKING ENDS MEET

  In this town, where Victorian dormer windows vie with Windows 98, every building and landscape detail—facades, loggias, pediments, cornices, eaves, setbacks, fence heights, and shrubbery—is governed by the style prescriptions, or “recommendations,” laid out in the town’s Pattern Book. Very little is left to chance, or, more precisely, to the mood of the capricious resident or the impatient builder. Everything that contributes visually to the public realm is regulated by codes aimed at refining the “conversation” between buildings and the streetscape. But the Pattern Book does not apply behind the Victorian and Colonial Revival facades, and so the insides and outsides of houses are as different as chalk from cheese.

  Village homes on Celebration Avenue. (Photo: the author)

  As far as I could see, the interiors followed conventional suburban floor-plan standards and bore little historical correlation to the deep wraparound porches, hipped roofs, and classical columns of the facades. This was just as well, since modern American families do not use space in the same way as did families of an earlier era. The homes that I had begun to visit boasted cathedral ceilings, open plan floors, with kitchen parlors bleeding into reception and dining spaces, and, in the larger ones, monster master bedrooms off to the side with bathrooms the size of Manhattan studios. In some of the custom-built estate homes, I was more likely to come across attempts at period styling—antique furniture and factory versions of original hand-carved moldings, medallions, casings, and wood paneling. In pursuit of design details for their Classical estate home on Water Street, Rodney and Debbie Jones visited Savannah, Charleston, Asheville, and Raleigh, following portions of the “Disney trail” blazed by the Celebration development team during their own research on traditional southern towns. The framing on the Joneses’ doors and interior windows, moldings on their skirtboards, and paneling on the pillars and window grills had all been copied from houses they visited. Customized with similar touches of period detail, the walls featured one very contemporary item: a series of Rodney’s abstract paintings, culled from his studio in the garage apartment. An insurance agent with State Farm and a leader of the community’s Catholic group, Rodney served tirelessly on almost every community committee in town, yet still had time to work in the “fluidist” style he conceived back in his Penascola high school days. His paintings, executed in oil, acrylic, plaster, and gel, were virtually the only nonfigurative artworks I ever saw in Celebration.

  At least one other likely venue for a Jones painting was Dave Eaton’s epicene home on Longmeadow. From the outside, it looked like a courteous Coastal, with wicker chairs spreading out all over the endless porch, but when the front doors opened, I found myself in a Mediterranean villa, cunningly laid out around a central courtyard pool and fountain. “Things are seldom what they seem,” mused Eaton. As befits the home of the founder of the Celebration Players, the two wings were decorated with high theatrical flair, each hosting a succession of rooms that could have been stage sets for entirely different plays: a Victorian sitting room over here, a deco bedroom over there, and, in front, like some Cole Porter–inspired hotel vestibule, an airy, yellow-hued room with a piano.

  In all my early visits to homes, the most surprising finding was the frequency of relatively empty interiors. It was as if the contents of entire rooms had been sucked away by a careful tornado. Boomers often favor uncluttered space, in contrast with the dense, tchotchke-crammed rooms of their parents’ homes. But it did not look as if these interiors were a bow to minimalism; their sparseness had more to do with cash flow. A sizable number of residents were chronically short of disposable income after stretching to buy homes priced almost 35 percent above the equivalent in nearby developments with similar amenities. Most homes in New Urbanist developments command a significant premium, since anything novel or unconventional in the housing industry tends to cost more to get built, but 35 percent was uncommonly high.7 David Weekley, one of the production (non-estate) builders in Celebration, claimed that the design “purity” demanded by the developer’s architectural Pattern Book drove their cost up by 30 percent, but most residents, especially those with experience in real estate, took this assertion with a grain of salt.8 With the range of options on offer, and an additional premium for a desirable lot, sticker shock was a common experience around town. David Tennant, a Scottish resident who had grown up in a cramped Glasgow tenement and was now the owner of a Charleston siderow on a Cottage lot across from the school, offered a typically wry description: “You start out thinking you’re going to buy a VW, and end up with a BMW.” Ron Dickson, a townhouse resident on the Academy Row section of Campus Street, with a background in the housing industry, put a different spin on his experience: “We thought we were buying a BMW and ended up with a VW.” He was referring to the cheap outfitting of much of the production housing in the Townhouse, Garden, Village, and Cottage ranges. Indeed, as residents like Dickson were dismayed to find, these homes came with bottom-of-the-line kitchen appliances, bathroom fixtures, doors, windows, and HVAC installations that you could find on the low-end shelves of any Home Depot store.

  Having begged and borrowed to pony up the town’s “expensive entrance fee,” as some folks describe the cost of setting up in Celebration, furniture and interior decoration are generally not a top priority. Gail and Alice would indeed have had a tough time here finding clients for their deluxe services. Gregory Schroeder, a pianist for the Community Presbyterian Church who works as an interior designer, confirmed that the town had not provided anything like the level of custom he had hoped for. Thomas Dunn, owner of the town’s traditional furniture store, gets very little business from Celebration residents. His English imports are passed over in favor of the “authentic reproductions” that residents order by catalog from Karen and Tom Zirbes, who own the adventurous bric-a-brac store on the other side of the street. Even the Zirbes, among the more popular of the town’s merchants, estimate that only 2 percent of their sales are from residents. The industry norm for expenditure on home decor, they say, is 25 percent of the price of the home. Celebration, it appeared, was coming in well under the median.

  I had been in town for only a few days when I first heard the Celebration mantra that mostly everyone here was “house-rich and cash-poor.” There were variations on this theme, such as “We used to have money, before we came to Celebration.” Aside from its plausible truth value, I took this comment to be a functional element of community folklore. Such a belief he
lped to soften the clear inequalities between people living in close proximity in mixed-income neighborhoods. Accustomed to being graded into pods or clusters that correspond to their incomes, this was a highly unusual situation for suburban Americans to find themselves in. In addition, the Celebration ethos of communitarianism demands that everyone is understood to be in the same boat, with no special advantages. While the housing equity and incomes of residents on neighboring blocks may differ substantially (each block consists of the same lot sizes, though no two houses are permitted to be identical), all are assumed to be spending every available dollar on their mortgages. Inside the town’s property line, the boomer sensibilities of most Celebrationites insist that they think of themselves as “average people.” Airs and graces are discouraged. Outside of town, they are viewed as befits the highest income residents in the region. Many residents professed bemusement at the opinion of county locals that Celebrationites were wealthy and snooty, although several confided their guilty pleasure to me: “I like the idea that other people might think I’m rich.” Jonathan Ferenczi, a forty-something townhouse resident with independent wealth and bohemian gusto, gleefully observed that he had moved to a place “where the poor masquerade as rich, and the rich pretend they are poor.”