The Business of Building Utopia

I have heard several weird issues from Uber drivers. But this was a new just one. 

“Are you confident?” she questioned, questioning my desired destination as I hopped into her auto at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport just one night very last fall. “I’ve been driving Uber to and from the airport for 5 several years now, and I have only taken another person south two times.” North is the city suitable and Atlanta’s endless suburban expanse. South is deep place. The crickets get louder and the sidewalks vanish.

Tucked into Georgia’s remote Chattahoochee Hills, a mere thirty miles from just one of America’s major city centers, is Serenbe (pronounced “saren-be”), a 750-resident, 1,four hundred-acre “agrihood” started in the early 2000s. Billed as a top quality-dwelling paradise—in its own literature and in Architectural Digest and O, the Oprah Journal, between others—it will allow inhabitants to link with mother nature even though surrounded by award-winning architecture. When I arrived, an worker handed me the keys to my lodging and an electrical golf cart to use for the period of my 5-day stay. But immediately after a pause she reconsidered. “Maybe I ought to generate you,” she explained, skeptical of my ability to navigate to my temporary home in the dim. We drove by a rustic-chic farmhouse restaurant and down a winding place highway, past a stylized rusted-metal signpost displaying the quotation “All attractiveness is an outward expression of inward great.” I uncovered the language pretentious, self-glad, and totally irresistible. Continue to, I felt a obscure feeling of worry soaring inside as we drove as a result of the darkened woods: Wherever was the award-winning architecture?

Just as my problems started to peak, we reached Serenbe’s residential space, a fully fashioned, cleverly made group like anything out of a Narnian fantasy. Now divided into 3 substantial “hamlets,” the progress is a whimsical hodgepodge of extra than 300 minimalist-modern-day properties, townhouses, cottages, and farmhouses. We handed a common retail store, a florist, a higher-conclude bike-restore shop, a university, and a playhouse ahead of achieving my two-bed room townhome in the hamlet of Grange. The 1,five hundred-sq.-foot lodging was approximately 3 moments the dimension of my New York apartment and experienced the ambiance of a top quality Airbnb, with sophisticated decor, a library of self-assist books, and Serenbe-branded glass h2o bottles. I stepped out on to the back deck overlooking a wooded expanse and was fulfilled with silence even Serenbe’s dense neighborhoods are totally free from the appears of targeted traffic and commerce. Quite a few inhabitants have electrical automobiles, and Serenbe rents out golf carts like mine to website visitors in an exertion to lower sounds air pollution. Even all through the busy day and night hrs, you can listen to a pin drop.