Forbes House of the Week: A Carmel-by-the-Sea Cottage |
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o one should ever be able to dictate what you do with your house.
Or should they? In California’s Carmel-by-the-Sea, the onetime colony of painters, poets, and writers founded in the Arts & Crafts movement’s crux of 1916, the city’s ever-stringent “residential design guidelines” and review-and-approvals proceedings grant it near-total control over what homeowners can and cannot do with their properties, down to the smallest of details. Carmel-by-the-Sea, with its tourism economy and resident population of about 3,000 dispersed over little more than 1 square mile, holds an incomparableness of character that leans heavily on one main physical attribute: the prevailing artistic “quality” of the local architecture’s stylistically varied traditions. By controlling the protection of this fundamental premise of the community’s identity as they do, Carmel-by-the-Sea keeps a firm grip on the preservation of its sense of place. Before any project gets built, the guidelines and those members of the city council charged........