March 2

If we sing loudly enough, and arrange ourselves beside a wall built in front of Treillage, a new development on Carmel Road, I'm sure we can make the Seven Dwarfs appear -- maybe Snow White, too.

That's because this wall is right out of Disney. Its cement exterior has been gouged out in places to reveal the stone beneath. It's like "distressing" a piece of furniture to give it a patina of age.

Except the wall doesn't look old, but cartoon-like. It's no more real than PR material referring to this development of three homes -- oops, "three chateaux" -- as a French "hamlet" and its gate "reminiscent of the gardens of Versailles."

What's going on here? For one thing, the upscale design theme in Charlotte is turning from Britain to France. For years, the preferred reference was "Olde English," as in "Foxcroft-Simsbury."

Now, Charlotte not only has Treillage, but Courance, the Crillon and St. Serrant. Sure, there's Chipping Camden, which will be "a unique English Village of 15 cottages." But the French influence is ascendant.

Pretentious? Sure. But there's more than over-the-top snob appeal at work. These projects mark a shift in the sources of home design we see around us.

Candy wrappers

Once, architecture rested firmly on site considerations, economics, context, prevailing styles, client wishes, and -- at its best -- the architect's problem-solving and aesthetic skills.

But this is a society where people proudly wear clothing that makes them walking billboards for designers. As critic Paul Goldberger wrote, the person who's had the most significant impact on American architecture in the last 20 years is Ralph Lauren.

Developer Frank Martin noted developers and architects often look for context as a starting point for design, and that may be where the naming of developments comes from.

"The particular examples you mention don't seem to pay attention to that principle, since our heritage doesn't include much that is French," said Martin, chairman of Landmark Properties. "If there's no historically appropriate ties to the larger whole, it seems to me misdirected."

These Frenchified Charlotte projects show the impact of marketing on design.

Before you create the product, you create the "concept." You don't design a building or a development and call it something. The name and marketing campaign come first, sort of like designing the wrapper and then the candy bar.

And the wrappers are snazzy.

At Roswell Avenue and Queens Road East we have St. Serrant, a condominium whose exterior is almost finished. As for the identity of the saint, the "Catholic Encyclopedia" lists a St. Serapion of Antioch, but no St. Serrant. Perhaps he/she was mythical.

The Crillon, a condo under construction on Fenton Place off Providence Road, parrots the name of a swank Paris hotel. Treillage may come from "treille," a climbing vine. "It is our intent to carefully reproduce the `patina' time and weather have so carefully carved in France," states a brochure.

Does Courance, a small subdivision off Sharon View Road, refer to au courant, up to date? For a project that looks backward?

Chipping Camden off Vernon Drive is taken from a village in the English Cotswolds. Now, all you see at the site are churned clods of good old Carolina red clay.

Disneyfication of Charlotte

After the "brand" and marketing comes the design.

Both the Crillon and St. Serrant have a mansard roof. Credited to 17th-century French architect Francois Mansart, a mansard has two slopes on each side, the lower slope steeper than the upper.

St. Serrant has chimney pots reminiscent of Montmartre and neo-classical detailing around the dormer windows, also like that Paris neighborhood. The architects, C.L. Helt Inc., took pains to break up an overscaled four-story building, for instance, using blind windows on the Roswell façade.

The building is clad in imported Italian limestone, beautifully fitted by Italian stonemasons.

The Crillon also is overscaled for a residential street. Compare it with the good-neighbor modernist (!) design by Crutcher Ross, right across Fenton. Designers at Narmour Wright Associates reduced the bulk with two rather plain buildings, one two-story and the other four.

The design connection to an invented French heritage at Treillage, developed by Elrod Construction, is tenuous. The wall is inauthentic. Look at the end and you'll see it's made of cinderblock beneath the cement and stone.

Mecklenburg County has precedents for stone walls, at 18th-century Hopewell Presbyterian Church on Beatties Ford Road and the nearby Davidson family cemetery, built by Baxter Davidson. But these are not French.

Treillage also has a stone bridge, which now spans red mud, but when the project is complete will cross "Monet's Pond." Surely, every French village needs a bridge and a pond. But can you have a hamlet with only three buildings? Don't you at least need a Circle K?

The houses at Chipping Camden will have English gardens and individual names, "Chawton Cottage" and "Bryden House." According to the PR material, they will be built in a rough stone style called "rubble."

That's the somewhat similar look of Courance, developed by David Simonini, who previously was more comfortable with McMansions.

These projects are expensive. The condos at St. Serrant start at $1.2 million. And they're exclusive. Treillage will be a gated community. Courance is.

Of course, all the names, the promises of authentic details and the designs have little -- if any -- connection to Charlotte. These projects are steeped in nostalgia. But it's not a fond recollection of real places as much as a caricature of them.

The idea is to create desire based on an invented pedigree. French is snootier than English.

This is theme-park development and Disney architecture.

What's wrong with that?

Nothing.

Except design, like life, is so much better when it's real.

Architecture Richard Maschal

Got, Alotta, Charlotte!

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