After arriving in Orlando for a postponed visit with our Florida kids this weekend, we choose to celebrate with dinner at one of our favorite Thai restaurants, Thai Thani. However, rather than the usual location, we decided to visit the location in Celebration, Florida - to fit the occasion and, more importantly, for a visit to the Christmas-light-bedecked homes in the area.
Celebration, Florida is not your average town. Rather, it's a community planned by none other than a real estate development division of it's neighbor, the Walt Disney Company. The evidence can be found in the homes, which are drawn from a common pattern book of six permitted house styles in a limited range of colors. Though the development was sold to a property management company in 2004, it still has the Disney spirit and flavor.
That stitching was no more evident than in the town centre, where a plastic sheet serves as an ice rink for small children trying to balance on real skates. Or the scheduled hourly blast of shaving cream spewing from snow machines perched on top of tall poles positioned around the square. Crowds gathered in their shorts and shirt sleeves to stand under the snow shower, with omnidirectional Muzak Christmas music broadcasting everywhere, oohing and awing as though they were experiencing the northern lights in the Canadian arctic for the first time.
Dinner was excellent, as usual, and the Christmas lights on many of those homes were stunning in their perfection. The matched the perfectly decorated and brightly lit interiors that were easily visible through unencumbered windows. Celebration is truly a very warm, comfortable, and safe-feeling community. It's easy to imagine why the families and retirees find it a perfect place to insulate themselves from the disposable architecture and repetitive commercial footprint so prevalent outside their borders.
Celebration, Florida is not your average town. Rather, it's a community planned by none other than a real estate development division of it's neighbor, the Walt Disney Company. The evidence can be found in the homes, which are drawn from a common pattern book of six permitted house styles in a limited range of colors. Though the development was sold to a property management company in 2004, it still has the Disney spirit and flavor.
One example is the interesting feature we noticed in our drive through the neighborhood. The doors in a majority of the homes we passed were the very tall and quite narrow, reflecting the picturesque pre-war southern tradition that many of their nostalgic designs were based upon. Common dormers, wings, window shutters, give the town a bit of the look and feel of a facade, like the kind found in Downtown Disney or Epcot. Some call it the stitching together of reality and fantasy.
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A "conventional" Celebration look.
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Fake Snow in the Town Square
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