What’s with the storybook cottages of Carmel-by-the-Sea? They began in 1924 when Hugh Comstock built a fairytale playhouse for his wife's dolls, and the village decided it wanted to live that way. Carmel-by-the-Sea, California is a one-square-mile village under the Monterey pines at the south end of Monterey Bay — a "village in a forest overlooking a white sand beach," in the words of its own founders — with no streetlights, no sidewalks past the shops, and, for its first hundred and ten years, no street addresses at all. The cottages with the rolled eaves and the leaning chimneys are the visible part. The invisible part is a 1929 ordinance that made every one of those choices deliberate, and a founding generation of poets and painters who wrote it.
At 5:12 on the morning of April 18, 1906, the ground moved for the better part of a minute and San Francisco stopped existing as anyone had known it. More than two hundred thousand people were homeless; the bohemian cafés were rubble. For a remarkable number of writers and painters the answer was simple: follow Sterling. Mary Austin came and wrote in a treehouse she called the Wickiup. Jack London came and went. The photographer Arnold Genthe came, and the MacGowan sisters, and Jimmy Hopper. An Arts and Crafts Club, formed in 1905, gave them all something to argue about. By 1910 the San Francisco Call could report that sixty percent of the houses in Carmel had been built by people devoting their lives to the aesthetic arts, and that year Herbert Heron carved an outdoor stage out of the woods and called it the Forest Theater. When the village incorporated on October 31, 1916, the poets ran the council — Heron and the writer Perry Newberry would both serve as mayor — and they had chosen unpaved streets, tents and rough cottages over everything a real city offered.
Why People Visit Carmel-by-the-Sea
Carmel offers artful streets beside a protected coast. Visitors come for the storybook architecture, the mission, the coastal reserves, and the simple pleasure of strolling a walkable, dog-friendly village. It is refined, peaceful, and endlessly photogenic, with a year-round mild climate. History and everyday village culture sit side by side here in a way few towns can match.
