Word: hanslin
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From the start of his building career, Hanslin has had a theatrical fascination for "what turns people on." One of his successes came with houses that sealed off "family room" kitchens and put more emphasis on sweeping stairways. His theory was that lots of women who could not cook would like to disguise the fact by making grand entrances, whereas even a good cook would rather not be regarded as "just a hausfrau." Sales of Hanslin's houses showed that "we hit it right on the button." In recent years, Hanslin has also done very well with "Yankee barns...
...Hanslin was so successful that the owners of 3,000 acres of land on Cape Cod asked him to join them in developing it. Cluster housing was just beginning to get serious attention at that time, and Hanslin took the idea one step further, grouping houses in "special interest" villages for golfers, sailors and horsemen. The result was New Seabury, perhaps the best-designed second-home community yet built in the Eastern U.S. From then on, Hanslin could pick his projects, and in 1969 he picked Eastman...
Deed Back. He began by studying the project for nine months. Clearly, he had to know his market: Who would buy second homes, and what kind? Equally clear was the rise of environmentalism, so Hanslin walked the land with planners and ecologists, analyzing soil, water, slopes and wind patterns. Then the roads and utility lines went in, following not a predetermined grid of homesites but the natural terrain. "You spend more time on the drawing board and a helluva lot more in the field," he says, "but you end up doing the least amount of developing-and spend the least...
...total of 1,647 house sites of one to five acres were planned, plus 400 clustered units-a high enough density to yield the owners a good return on their investment, but too high to preserve open space and forests. Hanslin got around the problem by grouping his sites in eleven petal-shaped villages that he calls, a bit cutely, "special places." More important, he requires every buyer to deed back to Eastman from 10% to 50% of his land (depending on "what creates the most advantageous site") as permanent open space. In this way, almost 30% of the land...
...Whether Hanslin's ideas will work to create a community remains to be proved, but a staff of enthusiastic young architects and planners are putting in long hours to see that they do. Having organized Eastman, they now are at work in a former warehouse in Manchester, N.H., to design Hanslin's next project, at a still secret location. On a long table stand flats of organically grown bean sprouts. Even more striking are wall charts tracing the development of dozens of bygone religious and idealistic communities, the failures as well as the successes. Each detail of their...