Developers put Lake Eufaula 'town' in the works

After a week of intense brainstorming, Carlton Landing is ready to be developed at Lake Eufaula, and Lake Eufaula is ready for Carlton Landing.

Just a week to design and plan a 1,600-acre resort community amounting to a whole new town — with a town center, businesses, a church, a school, community farm and housing from high-density apartments to cottages to neighborhoods to country estates — by Oklahoma City's Humphreys Co.

Kirk Humphreys, the former mayor, and his son, Grant, brought in architect Andres Duany, the renowned "guru” of the New Urbanism school of architecture and town planning, to lead the series of sessions, known as a charrette. Duany, co-founder of Miami, Fla.-based Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., presented the results this week in Oklahoma City, where the charrette took place.

"We are excited for any kind of development on Lake Eufaula. We're looking forward to seeing it develop and get going. It's our time,” said Connie Morris, executive director of the Lake Eufaula Association.

What's in store for the lakeshore?

Think Seahaven, the town in "The Truman Show,” the critically acclaimed 1998 hit movie starring comedian Jim Carey, minus the false reality. Carey's character, "Truman Burbank,” was the only person in Seahaven who wasn't an actor. Carey-Burbank didn't know he was starring in his own TV show.

There's nothing false about the connection: Seahaven was filmed in Seaside, Fla., a master-planned community in the Florida panhandle. Who developed Seaside? Andres Duany and DPZ.

Carlton Landing, if it all comes together as planned, will be 10 times larger than Seaside. The town center alone at Carlton Landing — the part with the highest density, community services and amenities and businesses, hard by the lakeshore — is the size of Seaside, Duany said.

Duany said he and his designers and engineers rarely have the freedom they enjoyed while working on Carlton Landing.

Most of the 300-some projects DPZ has done have been in urban or suburban settings with code and zoning issues that would tangle up developers' dreams in red tape and require "a lot of time in noncreative activity.”

The Humphreys land has never been developed — it's "as God made it,” the developers said — and is within no city limits. About the only marching orders the Humphreys gave Duany were first, make a design to fit Lake Eufaula, second, give it architecture to fit Oklahoma, and finally, design it for between 400 and 2,500 residents.

"This is a Garden of Eden” for a planner, Duany said of the experience. "It's paradise.”

Maybe not heaven on earth, but the way DPZ envisioned it, Carlton Landing will be a resort home away from home for exactly 1,463 households. The idea is to attract second-home homebuyers — mainly from Oklahoma City, Tulsa and Dallas — keeping jobs in the cities until retirement, then living on Lake Eufaula full time.

Carlton Landing is envisioned as more than an upscale neighborhood or mixed-use development. It's seen as a resort community with resort-like amenities.

"In some measure, utopian,” Duany said.

By designing it from scratch, Duany said, the project could become another model for modern town building, an alternative to "the suburban sprawl you have all over the place.”