A new development in Vallejo’s sand-colored hills is trying to make Thomas Kinkade’s paintings a reality with 101 houses inspired in part by his nostalgic art.
“The Village, a Thomas Kinkade Community” is being built at Vallejo’s eastern edge — one of eight neighborhoods in the Hiddenbrooke golf course development by Taylor Woodrow Homes. The Village’s four home designs echo architectural styles of the 1920s — the same era Kinkade portrays.
“This is America; this is where you co-brand,” said Taylor Woodrow development analyst Dan Fox.
The two-story, two- and three-bedroom houses will be 1,585 to 2,637 square feet, smaller than many to be built in the 1,200-home Hiddenbrooke. Prices will start in the low $400,000s.
Kinkade got involved when Taylor Woodrow approached his company about using the Kinkade name on houses based on Kinkade’s village scenes and on older California neighborhoods.
In Kinkade’s lush, colorful paintings it’s almost always sunrise or sunset. Windows in old-fashioned cottages brim with light and smoke wisps curl from stone chimneys. There might be beautiful spring blooms on the plants and fall foliage on the trees — all at the same time.
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“My work is purely escapist; it’s comfort art for sure,” Kinkade said.
The Village will be Hiddenbrooke’s only gated community. Kinkade is not troubled by its gate or its relative seclusion near the American Canyon Road exit off I-80. To Kinkade, “designed communities are a physical extension of that escapist dream” created by his art.
But Stephanie Coontz, author of “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap,” sees problems.
“So basically, they’re buying escapism,” she said. “They’re buying exactly what he’s selling, but I think they’ll get the illusion of a community rather than the reality.”
She said older, small-town communities were good places to live because of the face-to-face exchanges among people of different classes, the interaction among neighbors and its resulting reciprocity.
Tony Thomopoulos, chairman and interim chief executive of Media Arts Group, Kinkade’s art company, is having none of it. He calls Coontz’s reasoning “psychobabble” and said that many people aren’t friendly with neighbors, regardless of where they live. “I can look at this gated community and say it enhances the sense of community.”
Marilyn Denham, 57, and Janice Stires, 29, are both considering settling in The Village.
Denham and her husband, who works in construction, moved to Sonoma County, Calif., more than a year ago from Lake Havasu, Ariz.
Denham, who’s retired, is interested in the lifestyle presented by the Hiddenbrooke complex — the Arnold Palmer Signature golf course, that is.
She knew of Kinkade, but his name did not draw her to The Village. Still, she thinks its ties to Kinkade “kind of added a new depth to the housing industry.”