Butter-Pecan Builder

"Almost anyone will eat vanilla ice cream. But damn it, people get turned on by pistachio and butter pecan."

That is a rather unusual creed for a real estate developer. Butter-pecan houses? But Emil Hanslin, a weather-beaten, chain-smoking dynamo of 52, is an unusual developer. An early proponent of cluster housing, he is now experimenting with a new way to preserve open space. Says he: "It's a very simple thing but a big idea. The buyer buys the whole acre, but he gives up part of his land to the community. That makes him feel like the Rockefellers, creating a system of space that he can enjoy and others can enjoy."

The site of this experiment is a new vacation community called Eastman, a 3,500-acre swath of forests, lakes and hills in southern New Hampshire. The property's actual owners--Dartmouth College, the Manchester Bank, United Life & Accident Insurance Co. and the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests--searched for months to find somebody to resolve their almost contradictory requirements. They wanted Eastman to be a high-quality development that also would include some low-priced housing while conserving as much land as possible--and all to be sold at a profit. If anyone could deliver that, they decided, it would be Emil Hanslin.

Pride. Hanslin was born a builder. His grandfather was a Swiss-German carpenter; his father headed a construction firm, as did two uncles. Indeed, the competing family firms built up miles of land in and around St. Louis during the 1920s and 1930s--with young Emil digging and hammering as a laborer for both of them. He launched a career as a theatrical director, but one night he heard his father and an uncle debating about who had built better houses. "At first I thought it was damn funny, but then I began getting the message. These guys arguing over a 20-year-old house were proud of the stuff they'd built. It was a lot more significant than a few minutes of applause."

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," prefabricated structures made out of a combination of modern materials and old timbers salvaged from 19th century mills.

By 1960 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 amount of money disturbing things and putting them back."

A 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 will be preserved. It is one of the best conservation ideas since cluster planning; it also sells as easily as, well, butter-pecan ice cream. Some 475 plots have already gone for $5,300,000.

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 way of life is marked, from food raising to sleeping arrangements.

Why so much esoteric research? Hanslin senses that property buyers now want to control their immediate environment, and he suspects that this "ego approach" will supplant the "hedonism communities" of recent years. Whether this is true is largely speculation, but Hanslin likes to speculate. "There is so much room for improvement in the residential area," says he. "There are so damn many challenges everywhere."

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