Devon Zuegel is Building a New Town

Click here to subscribe to print for your office or home.

Devon Zuegel grew up visiting her grandparents every summer in Chautauqua, a small town in southwest New York State built by American inventors and entrepreneurs during the Industrial Revolution. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Harvey Firestone summered there with their families. Edison personally wired the town’s main hotel—the first ever to be lit by electric bulbs.

For nine weeks every summer, Chautauqua transforms into an intellectual hub where Nobel Prize winners give morning lectures, children attend afternoon workshops, and families gather for evening performances—all within walking distance. When Zuegel first took her husband there, he asked: “Why aren’t there more places in America like this?”

“That stopped me dead in my tracks,” she told us.

Esmeralda is Zuegel’s answer: A walkable town 90 minutes north of San Francisco that takes the best parts of Chautauqua and updates them with the Bay Area’s dynamism, diversity, and culture of invention. She plans to make “one of the most beautiful new places in the country”—a modern take on an Italian hill town built in California wine country.

“If you dream of living in a small town surrounded by creative, high-agency people, we’re building this for you,” she explains.

Residents and guests will benefit from the village’s five design principles, which seek to: 

1. Support a multi-generational community
2. Prioritize pedestrians and cyclists over cars
3. Cultivate a culture of learning and building
4. Harmonize with nature
5. Promote health and wellness

This design philosophy stems from Zuegel’s belief that environment shapes identity. “I don’t think of my identity as just myself,” she said. “My identity includes the place that I’m physically located in. When I’m in San Francisco, for example, I have different thoughts and take different actions than when I’m in New York City or Buenos Aires.”

A former software engineer, Zuegel has spent a decade studying urban design. “The distance between your home and your friend’s house determines whether you knock on their door spontaneously or plan ahead via text,” she says. “The width of a street affects whether you cross it easily or avoid the other side entirely. The cost of space in Manhattan makes restaurants rush you through dinner, while a diner in Nebraska lets you sit for hours.”

To test her vision, Zuegel co-organizes an annual month-long prototype called Edge Esmeralda. Created in collaboration with Edge City, which runs temporary communities globally, the popup village takes place in Healdsburg—15 minutes from the Cloverdale land where she will build the permanent town. About 1,000 people attend each year, experiencing what an Esmeralda-like world would feel like.

“The hardest part of building a town is the timelines involved and how long the feedback loops are,” says Zuegel. “I asked myself, how do we take this huge thing and turn it into smaller bite-sized pieces that we can learn from?”

Edge Esmeralda operates as a giant unconference: “Instead of having central organizers create a schedule and assign slots for speakers, we create a container for things to happen. We provide the venues and tools but people populate the schedule themselves.”

Last year, one participant’s text asking for help building solar A-frames became a collaborative campsite and night market in the redwoods. This year, a group built a solar-powered data center next to a wildflower farm. Exactly the kind of spontaneous creation Zuegel hopes to foster permanently.

The month-long event also creates fertile ground to nurture local relationships in Sonoma County before construction on Esmeralda begins. “We’ve already collaborated with hundreds of locals, running a multimillion-dollar event that brings business and cultural energy into the local community.”

Now she faces the reality of building a town from scratch.

“First you have to purchase the land; then you have to build infrastructure like roads, sewage systems, and electric grid; then there’s what’s called vertical development, which in our case will be homes, a major resort hotel or two, condos, senior housing, cafes, restaurants, and event spaces,” Zuegel says. “People don’t realize how expensive roads, water, and power are. I spend a lot of my day talking to our general contractor and civil engineer.”

Esmeralda Land Company—the business Zuegel founded—is handling the horizontal work: designing and building infrastructure that transforms raw land into buildable lots. Vertical developers will then purchase those lots to construct the buildings.

“We are creating the trellis that everything else can grow upon,” says Zuegel.

Most developers build only the “hardware” of a community, leaving the “software”—human interactions and social fabric—to form on its own. Zuegel has spent seven years developing that software. Her experiments began small: an annual three-day gathering for scientists and founders, then “traveling neighborhoods” where she invites 20 to 50 people to rent homes within walking distance of each other in places like Buenos Aires, Las Catalinas, and Taipei. 

“It’s like gardening,” she says. “You start with a few potted plants before attempting to cultivate an entire garden.” Edge Esmeralda transplants these insights near Cloverdale at a thousand-person scale, refining the social technologies that will animate the permanent village.

The hardware will be equally intentional, designed with this software in mind. It will look very different from most places built in the US since World War II, which maximize the sellable private space in each individual home and prioritize driving. 

Esmeralda will have private space, but will emphasize public streets, plazas, and semi-private thresholds like porches and courtyards that serve as bridges between public and private life.

As a result, the town will have a far more compact design. Esmeralda plans to use less than one-quarter of its site for buildings. The rest will be preserved for natural open space, a riverfront park, vineyards, and community gardens. Streets will prioritize pedestrians and cyclists, treating cars as necessary guests rather than owners of public space.

“We are following the tradition of Italian hilltowns, which typically crown the top of a hill, surrounded by a wide belt of fields, winelands, forests, and other greenery,” Zuegel says. “Walk five minutes in one direction into a vibrant piazza with a cafe, ice cream shop, restaurants, and stores. Or five minutes in the other direction into serene nature, criss-crossed with hiking trails.”

“We will know the site plan was successful if parents let their kids walk to the piazza to play with friends, and if neighbors easily connect when sitting on their porches.”

Three years ago, Zuegel traveled the country to meet the people who built towns she admired—places like Seaside, Serenbe, Alys Beach. These walkable developments command significant premiums over conventional subdivisions: Seabrook at 92% above market, Alys Beach at 143%, Serenbe at 129%. The infrastructure costs less to build as well, requiring fewer roads, pipes, and cables to serve the same population. For Zuegel, these numbers prove that building genuine community isn’t just idealistic, it’s profitable.

Back at Esmeralda, the entire first phase of development has already been reserved. Families and individuals are committing to new homes in a town that doesn’t yet exist.

While success means proving this model can inspire others to build vibrant communities, Zuegel’s deepest motivation is personal: “I’m building this because I want to live here. I’m building the place where I would like to raise my future family and spend my life.”

“Every town that exists had to be started at some point. Someone was the first person to move in,” she says.