“Pedestrian-first” means more than adding sidewalks. It means deciding, from the beginning, who the best parts of a place are actually for.

In much of American real estate development, we design the movement of cars first: Roads determine the blocks, parking determines the buildings where storefronts face the road, and then pedestrians get whatever space remains between the curb and the front door.

At Monteverde, however, we’re approaching that hierarchy differently so the pedestrian realm comes first.

Piazzas, promenades, courtyards, and pedestrian streets aren’t leftover spaces between buildings - they’re some of the most important spaces we’re designing. Wherever possible, storefronts will face into those places rather than turning their front doors toward traffic, which changes what happens outside them.

We talk a lot about creating places where people want to live. For Labor Day, it seems appropriate to talk about creating places where people might actually enjoy going to work.

Somewhere along the way, I think we broke the office. Millions of people now battle their way through a commute, find a desk, open a laptop, put on a headset, and spend much of the day on video calls with people sitting somewhere else - or worse, a few aisles over. Then they get back in the car and battle their way back home.

It’s unsurprising people aren’t particularly enthusiastic about this arrangement.

What if one of the greatest luxuries we could build was simply not having to make everything a big production?

Need coffee? Walk downstairs. Dinner? Around the corner. Groceries? A few minutes away. School drop-off? No need at all to join an interminable line of cars.

Meeting a friend for lunch, picking up a prescription, getting your hair cut, grabbing something you forgot for dinner…ordinary life contains an astonishing number of these - sometimes incredibly inconvenient - little journeys. Somewhere along the way, particularly in much of the United States, we designed the places in which we live so that nearly every one of them requires getting into the car.

Monteverde is being designed around a different proposition: What if you could drive because you WANT to, rather than because you HAVE to?

Picture this: Monteverde, 2030-something.

Motorcycles are on track.

Oktoberfest is in full swing in the village.

You can hear the bikes in the distance as you walk through a piazza filled with long communal tables, live music, flowers spilling from balconies, and the smell of something considerably better than standard event concessions. Some people are wearing team colors. An oompah band in lederhosen adds to the soundtrack. Some have absolutely no idea who qualified on pole and are happily going about their Sunday anyway.

This is not a subdivision. And it isn’t a resort.

It’s also not a site plan, as site selection for Monteverde is still underway. While we don’t yet know the exact topography, waterways, road connections, views, environmental constraints, or other characteristics of the land that will ultimately shape the community, we do know what it should feel like.

And that matters.

I don’t want to design a town on paper and then force it onto whatever property we acquire. The land should have a voice in what gets built there.

So this image is something different: a conceptual vision of what Monteverde is intended to feel like at full scale.

What makes a place feel like home? It’s rarely just the four walls of the house.

It’s the local coffee shop where they know your order when you walk in the door and the bakery where the owner remembers your name.

The square where neighbors gather and the park where children play.

The trees and porches and balconies that change with the seasons.

The architecture that makes you slow down and look up.

But beyond that, I’ve always believed beautiful places matter simply because they matter.

That beauty means something much deeper than aesthetics the eye can appreciate.