"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.