hilton head islandPortrait

146 Portrait december 2007

From a simple wish to save some

of Hilton Head Island’s trees, Charles Fraser

created the innovative Sea Pines Resort,

setting new standards for developments

that respect the natural environment

and the way people play.

by Lisa Watts

PlannerM a S t e R

opposite page: Charles Fraser and a four-legged friend. this page: Fraser’s legacy in sea Pines Resort includes landscaping that preserves and celebrates trees and other natural features.

A genius or a fool. The young Charles Fraser had to be one or the other.

It was the mid-1950s. The recent Yale law graduate had talked his father into selling him a couple thousand acres of timber property on the southern tip of a South Carolina barrier island. Where everyone else saw thick woods and mosquito-infested marshes steeped in Southern humidity, Fraser saw a summer resort for the well-to-do. He would capitalize on its ocean beaches. Inland, Fraser would create golf courses, then build unobtrusive homes around them.

Perhaps most importantly, Fraser drew on his law background to create private covenants and deed restrictions to protect the open space and to force such things as house plans, exterior colors, even mailbox placement to be approved by boards.

Such ideas might sound like standard fare today, but at mid-century they were highly novel approaches. Fifty years after he created Sea Pines Plantation, spurring similar growth across Hilton Head Island, Charles Fraser is remembered

SC Dept.Comm.indd 1 10/23/07 11:11:37 AM

as one of the nation’s most innovative developers (he died in 2002). His basic tenets—respect the natural environs while developing them for people to enjoy, create private living spaces but public areas to gather, and establish legal deeds and restrictions—have informed and inspired resort and land-use planning around the world.

Benevolent dictatorIn the first few decades of building

Sea Pines, Fraser faced skepticism, even ridicule, for his ideas. Partners in his parents’ lumber company laughed at his notion that Hilton Head Island—now an international golf destination—could support two golf courses. Despising the “massive visual pollution on the Atlantic,” Fraser was determined not to stack rows of houses and hotels along the beach, preferring to set them back almost hidden in the pines.

For starters, he consulted with an entomologist who helped him control mosquitoes on the island. He championed the state’s building of a bridge from the mainland and the introduction of air-conditioning.

David Ames and John Curry were hired by Sea Pines in 1973. Ames was

named vice president of community planning, Curry vice president of resort operations. Their boss was brilliant, spontaneous and very much a benevolent dictator who greatly influenced their ideas about land use and advancement.

“He understood where he wanted to go strongly enough that he was pretty insistent about his ideas,” says Curry, now president of The Curry Company, a consulting firm. “But he really valued curiosity and creativity.”

Within Sea Pines, Fraser created Harbour Town, a village setting modeled after Portofino, Italy.

“The rocking chairs scattered around Harbour Town, the whole design of the place, grew out of his understanding that people like to watch other people,” says Ames, now president of Amesco, a development company.

Richard Galehouse’s first job out of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in the early 1960s was to research options for stripe colors and designs on the Harbour Town Lighthouse. Galehouse had joined Sasaki Associates, the pioneering landscape architecture and urban planning firm in Boston that partnered with Fraser

Fraser, far left, on the future harbour town links course with Jack nicklaus, Pete dye, and donald o’Quinn. above, the harbour town lighthouse.

150 Portrait december 2007150 Portrait december 2007

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to design much of Sea Pines.Fraser’s brilliance included

an aptitude for marketing, says Galehouse, now a principal at Sasaki. Fraser talked famed designer Pete Dye into creating Harbour Town Links Golf Course. Then he created the Heritage Classic and persuaded Arnold Palmer to compete in it. The icing on the cake: Palmer won. Television coverage of the PGA Tour event, Galehouse notes, “really helped turn on the market” for Sea Pines. It’s also no accident that the iconic lighthouse lines up in a TV camera’s viewfinder with the 18th hole.

“Sea Pines was America’s first contemporary, post-World War II destination resort,” Galehouse says. “It embodies three ideas: a family resort married to nature, so that you still have the feel of wilderness when you walk the beach; using golf courses on interior land to create real estate value; and creating a public space like Harbour Town so people have a place

to go in the evening. Those three ideas are widely copied today in the resort industry.”

life of the mindGenius usually carries with it

some eccentricity. The first thing friends, family members and former employees will tell you about Charles Fraser is that he read voraciously. Absorbed in a book, he could be oblivious to a whirlwind of activity around him.

Former colleagues remember his habit of walking into neighbors’ homes, reading their newspapers and magazines, ripping out something he found of interest, and leaving.

“The essence of Charles was his mind,” recalls Ames. “It was encyclopedic.”

Agrees Laura-Lawton Fraser, the younger of his two daughters, “Dad lived totally in his mind. He didn’t bike, swim, golf, play tennis, or any of the other things we had here. He

was a cerebral intellect. He was either working or reading.”

Fraser’s one recreational pursuit—sailing on his boat, Compass Rose—usually turned into impromptu brainstorming sessions with invited guests. Yet he had no capacity for chit-chat. He was either drawn to people for their ideas or he ignored them, not out of rudeness but indifference.

It took Charles Fraser’s mother to point out that Mary Wyman Stone, the striking, capable young woman he hired in 1963 as Sea Pines’ social director, might make more than a professional partner. For six months, Stone dined nightly with Fraser to entertain prospective home buyers staying at his William Hilton Inn. Then she gave notice, ready to trade the remote island for Manhattan. Mrs. Fraser called her

Fraser conceived of harbour town (above) for vacationers to socialize. arnold Palmer’s heritage Classic win vaulted the event and hilton head into the public eye.

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hilton head islandPortrait

son long-distance from Georgia, a rare extravagance. “All she said,” as Laura-Lawton, her granddaughter, recounts it, “is ‘Charles, do you work all the time?’ Then click.”

As husband and wife, the two created the heart and soul of the young resort. Charles surrounded himself with dozens of bright young men, most with fresh Harvard MBAs. He handed them big titles and responsibilities. Mary saw to the needs of their wives and children in a community that barely had a grocery store or medical care. The bike trails that wind through Sea Pines, for example, and now through much of Hilton Head—were the couple’s idea because kids needed a place to play.

the highest standardsWhile Fraser excelled at scheming

and innovating, he fell short in managing finances. He weathered several rounds of near-bankruptcy, beginning with the economic downturns of the 1970s, when he was developing a handful of properties from Amelia Island in the Southeast to Palmas del Mar in Puerto Rico. Often he had to turn the properties over to the banks. Somehow, he always bounced back.

“If Charles had just concentrated on Sea Pines, he would have had a home run [financially]. But he saw more allure in other places,” says Ames. “If you look at the individual properties, they’re all remarkably successful. But he lost control of his empire of ideas.”

Laura-Lawton Fraser knows that ideas, not money, drove her father. His generosity is one of the memories she treasures most. From the smallest things—giving employees their birthday off—to bigger things, like hiring an attorney to help island natives get clear title on land they had inherited, “the beautiful thing is that no one knew he did that stuff. He had the ability to do it, so he did.”

His many awards include the Urban

Land Institute’s 1994 Heritage Award for Sea Pines. The award recognizes projects at least 25 years old that set the highest standards for excellence in land use and community building.

“Charles Fraser’s vision of Hilton Head has really stood the test of time,” says Bill Miles, president and CEO of the Hilton Head Island-Bluffton Chamber of Commerce. “The natural beauty, all the things that people have come to know, love, and respect about Hilton Head remain today.”

Hilton Head Mayor Tom Peeples campaigned in 1998 to name a new four-lane bridge over Broad Creek for Fraser. Maintaining Fraser’s legacy of strict zoning and sign restrictions

gets harder each year, Peeples says, but “it’s still harder to cut down a tree here than it is almost anywhere.”

Fraser continued to consult on development. He was 73 when he died in a boating explosion while inspecting sites in the West Indies.

Fraser once told Laura-Lawton that he wanted to be buried under the live oak in Harbour Town. That tree cost him $70,000, in 1960s dollars, when he ordered engineers to redesign the harbor to save it. Considering that his appreciation for land grew out of his simple desire, as a young Eagle Scout, to save the tall pines along the island’s coast from the lumber mills, this final resting place suits Fraser perfectly—it’s slightly quirky and brilliantly apt.

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smart planning and strict zoning have allowed much of sea Pines Resort (including the harbour town Grill and Clubhouse, above) to remain as Fraser and his team originally designed it.