The Sea Ranch

When Al Boeke flew over this strip of coast in 1962, scouting a site for a new town on behalf of Oceanic Properties, a Hawaii developer's subsidiary, it was an overgrazed sheep ranch. What held his eye were the hedgerows: double rows of Monterey cypress planted across the meadows early in the century to break the wind. Oceanic bought the ranch from the Ohlson family in 1963.

The landscape architect Lawrence Halprin read the land before anyone drew a house. His plan kept the open meadows as commons and set buildings against the hedgerows and the forest edge, out of the wind and out of one another's views. Two demonstration projects fixed the look. Condominium One, ten units by Moore, Lyndon, Turnbull and Whitaker finished in 1965, steps down its slope in timber walls and steep single-pitch roofs. Joseph Esherick's Hedgerow Houses sit tucked into a row of cypress, their roofs angled the way the wind has bent the trees.

The idea did not hold all the way through. With its finances failing in the 1980s, Oceanic fell back on ordinary subdivision, and the later houses show it. Condominium One was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.

The lodge is open to the public. Condominium One is private homes, seen from the lodge grounds.