Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Well, I've been in real estate in Atlanta now for almost ten years, and I think I've done a little bit of everything in that time. I've been involved in office projects, residential, apartments, condominiums, condo conversions, land development. A lot of retail. I've worked on a bunch of adaptive re-use projects, fixing up older historic buildings. You name it.

So how did this new cottage project come about?

Well, you know, it's not really a new product. We're not doing anything "new." Small homes built around a common space is about as old as mankind. People on every continent and in every age have built that way for centuries. But in the race to improve our lives over the past half century we've improved ourselves right out of anything meaningful.

It just looks new and different because hardly anyone builds with a sense of purpose or vision anymore.

Okay, I stand corrected. Tell me about these "old" cottage projects.

They're great. Amazing. I'm just as excited as I can get about what we're doing. I can't wait to get up every morning. We've gotten a lot of really good feedback, and people are getting excited, and it's just great.

We're building cottage homes. Beautifully detailed, wonderfully designed cottages. And just as importantly we're building them in little communities, little "pocket neighborhoods" as someone has called them.

The cottages in each community we're building are fee simple homes, so in other words you own a zero-lot-line lot underneath your home. And they're all detached; no town homes, here. But all the exterior landscaping and maintenance is taken care of by the association.

We keep cars to the periphery where they belong, and we orient all of the cottages on a common green. Each home has a huge porch, and gets its own little garden which you can care for or you can have the landscaping crew tend to. And the common has gardens and green space and a vegetable garden and a community area that all the residents can use.

We're building homes and places that matter, and it's exciting to do. Seems like so few developers do that today.

That was my next question. If you're getting such great feedback then why is no one else doing this?

Well, some people are. There are several developers on the west coast who have been building this cottage concept for a while now, and the market has embraced them. And they've been doing this in Europe for ages, but typically over there it's got a commune-type element to it.

But this concept has been the hardest thing we've done. It's been a real eye-opener for us. The system is set up to stop you from creating places with thoughtfulness and with care.

How do you mean?

Okay, take the zoning code for example. There's not a zoning law in the area that allows what we're trying to do. Not one. And it's not just our cottage concept. Zoning doesn't let you build great places anymore. If Virginia Highland burned down tomorrow you couldn't rebuild it.

It takes a lot of patience. We have to sit down with city officials, show them this wonderful product, and ask "can we do this?" And then we have to draft a rezoning petition that usually has a list of variances a mile long, just so we can do commonsensical things like have the cottages share a front yard. Or remove the garages to the rear of the property.

I think we'll see a lot more of these little cottage communities in Atlanta over the next decade. It's just the right concept at the right time.

Do you consider yourself "Smart Growth?"

Absolutely. No question. We are very much in the Smart Growth camp. People are so hungry for a sense of place, for a sense of community. Look at how people are flocking to Atlantic Station. It's crazy.

Why do you think people are so enamored with these types of projects?

I wouldn't say "enamored," because I think that implies something temporary, whereas I think great places fill a basic human need that we are generally lacking.

People have begun to realize that their towns and communities can be wonderful, vibrant places. I think that a lot of us have realized that we can't just go on building strip mall after strip mall, McMansion after McMansion.

Why not?

Oh, boy. Have you got two hours? I can hear my wife rolling her eyes as I start to get up on my soap box. I won't kill you with my Sprawl Speech, but there are so many, many reasons why we cannot continue in this way.

For us, honestly, it's about place-making. It's about meaning and purpose and vision. I know that sounds so corny, but it's true. We are very passionate about it.

It is also what we think the market demands. Americans are getting smart about good growth. There have been too many Seasides and I'on Villages and Atlantic Stations out there. Everything is starting to change. No one wants the old cul-de-sac subdivision anymore. We've all realized what a hollow and meaningless experience it is.

But every new development brochure out there talks about community and neighborhood and all those warm, fuzzy feelings. Are developers starting to get the message?

By and large, no. They're not. A few have. A few have gotten religion. There are some great developments all over the Atlanta area. Great towers in Midtown, wonderful shopping districts in north Fulton. It seems like new villages are springing up everywhere.

But those guys are few and far between. It's a lot easier to pay some marketing company a lot of money to create brochures with a lot of fancy words that imply meaning, rather than actually struggle to create something with real meaning.

I mean, I suppose if you churn out 10,000 home a year, then yeah, it's hard to make each one different and meaningful even if you try, though it seems no one does. And if that's what some guys want to do, then great for them. But it's not what we want to do. We're on pace to build fifty cottages in the next fifteen months. Maybe we'll get to the point where we're building one hundred a year or so, but even that sounds like a little too much to me. I just don't get why we'd want to. We're not in this to build everything everywhere near everyone. Making special places takes time. I've been agonizing over the fences at Clear Creek for months.

You're joking.

No, I'm serious. It sounds silly, I know, but that's just one of many things I spend hours hashing out with the architects and land planners and designers and sales agents and everyone else on the team. Should the fences be brick? Wrought iron? Wooden picket? Okay, why should they be that? Why are we even putting up fences? What purpose do they serve? Should they all be the same? Different? How high? What kind of detailing around the walkways? Gate or no gate?

But how do you create a place worth creating if you don't agonize over those little things? Why build at all if it's just an afterthought, if you're just a commodity?

Tell us about some of the places that have inspired you. You mentioned Seaside and some others.

Those places are great. One of a kind. And again, they're really great because they show people that they can and should have high expectations.

I've been lucky, and I've lived in a couple of fantastic communities. I went to college at the University of Virginia, and I was lucky enough in my last year to live on the Lawn. This was the original campus designed by Thomas Jefferson two hundred years ago. The Lawn was this special, special place. You've probably seen pictures, but it's a central green surrounded by the Rotunda, which the library, and classrooms and rooms for students and teachers. All connected by a covered colonnade.

The dorm rooms were tiny, and drafty, and they didn't have air conditioning, and the electrical wasn't up to code, and the fireplaces didn't draw. And the most challenging thing of all was there were no bathrooms—you had to walk a hundred yards to one of the common facilities for the Lawn residents!

But it was perfect. Perfect. It was just so incredibly special you had to fight to get a room. I think 700 kids applied for one of 55 rooms my year. It was actually voted the single greatest achievement in American architecture a few years back.

Any place here in Atlanta have that kind of effect on you?

When I moved to Atlanta after college I lived in Virginia Highland for many years. The house was kind of a dump, but I loved every day of it. Entire weekends would go by and I wouldn't touch my car. I'd get up, walk to get a cup of coffee, browse the used book store, walk my dog to the park, whatever.

Actually, you know, we used to joke that you had to take a vacation on the first nice spring weekend, because everyone from twelve counties would be driving in just to walk around Virginia Highland. That's how desperate Atlantans are for an honest-to-god neighborhood; they'll drive 45 minutes one way just to go spend a Saturday walking around one.

I hadn't thought of it that way.

How many visitors come to look and walk around your neighborhood? That should be everyone's standard: you should never be content with where you live unless people drive in from out of town to look at it.

What does "neighborhood" mean to you?

I think it has to be more than just a cluster of homes. A community, meaning that people really live in communion with each other. I think there has to be a great deal of social interaction before a grouping of houses can be called a neighborhood. In today's society, that seems so hard to achieve.

I'd bet almost anyone that, at most, they know six families in their neighborhood. At most. You probably know the two people on either side of you, you might know two or maybe three of the folks that live directly across the street, although you probably only wave to them in the morning. If you're really outgoing or if your fence is in terrible shape you might know the guy whose yard backs up to yours. But that's it. And that's a shame.

Who's your target buyer?

One- and two-person households. Singles, empty-nesters, young couples starting out. Maybe a couple with a small child. I think we appeal a lot to second-time homebuyers.

Why is that?

I think most first-timers do get caught up in the "bigger is better" mentality. Then they purchase some place that's too big and has cheap finishes and one day they realize they want something else.

Most people do not need 3,500 square feet, and we're building for those people. You know, my wife and I, and our coonhound, live in a 2,200 square foot 1930s bungalow we renovated. And it's too big. We don't use half of it.

These cottages are for smaller households. They're built exceptionally well, and we agonize over the details, and we provide a lot of storage and a lot of features that you typically would only get in a mini-mansion. They're great homes. There's nothing else out there like them.

The damnedest part of the whole thing is that homes keep getting bigger while families keep shrinking. One hundred years ago the average new American home was 700 square feet. 700 square feet! That's a studio apartment today. Today the average new home is over 2,300 square feet. All the while the average household has shrunk to 2.5 people, and the only segment of the homebuyer market that's increasing in size is singles. It makes no sense at all.

Why do you think this is happening? If it doesn't make sense then why is it happening?

I'm not sure. I think we've got a lot of issues at play, here. I think it's so amazing how much we as a people have come to equate quantity with quality. If it's bigger, people just assume it's better.

And I think the home-building industry is partially to blame. See, the guts of the house are very expensive to build. The kitchen, the bathrooms, the HVAC, the roof—those are expensive. But those last rooms, the media room, the keeping room, the bonus room, those are cheap, cheap, cheap to build. They're only building air. The expensive stuff is already in, so why not just cram more and more space into the house, even though you don't need it? Even though you don't have the furniture for it, here you go. See, look at all the value I'm giving you; because I built more air and tricked you into paying for it.

What's your competition?

It varies from neighborhood to neighborhood, but really condos and town homes. And I think we've got them beat. Hands-down. Why would you live attached to someone or below someone when you can have your own cottage? Why would you live overlooking a parking lot when you can drink your coffee and read your newspaper looking out over this great garden and green space? That someone else takes care of! Why would you have a cookie cutter town home when you can live in a quaint, beautiful, artfully-designed cottage home?