Seaside 30A pavilion
— a white wooden gate that opens onto the Gulf.
Not only on a wall.
Seaside 30A pavilion, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“Each pavilion is a different architect's small answer to the same question: how to cross the road and arrive at the water. Seaside commissioned them one at a time through the 1980s and 90s, white-painted wood, lattice and cupola, each one a different signature. The town that started New Urbanism in 1981, on the sugar-white sand of the Florida Panhandle, walks itself entirely. The pavilions are how it ends.
The place, in three passes.
Seaside is an unincorporated master-planned community in Walton County on Florida's Scenic Highway 30A, founded in 1981 by Robert and Daryl Davis on 80 acres of family land. It is the founding project of the New Urbanism movement, designed by Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk on a code-based plan that fixed lot sizes, picket-fence heights, and the relationship of porch to street. The Gulf-front pavilions, set at the dune crossings along 30A, are the town's most photographed feature and its public face.
There are nine beach pavilions along Seaside's mile of Gulf frontage, each commissioned from a different architect and built one at a time from the late 1980s onward. The roster includes Léon Krier, Steven Holl, Walter Chatham, Deborah Berke, Roger Ferri, Scott Merrill, and Robert A. M. Stern. They share a vocabulary, white-painted wood, lattice, cupola, classical fragment, but no two read alike. Coleman Pavilion, the first, opened in 1988; Stern's Tupelo Pavilion is among the most recognised, with its high octagonal lantern.
Seaside sits about 25 miles east of Destin and 35 miles west of Panama City Beach along County Road 30A. The town is small enough to walk in an afternoon. Public parking along 30A is metered; bicycle is the local preference. Each pavilion gives free public access across the dunes; the beach itself runs the full width of town. The Seaside Farmers Market opens at Amavida Plaza Saturday mornings; the airstream food trucks line the central square year-round.
