Seaside and Rosemary Beach

Seaside is a thriving planned community with old-fashioned Victorian architecture, brick streets, restaurants, retail stores—and a surfeit of art galleries. The brainchild of Robert Davis, Seaside was designed to promote a neighborly, old-fashioned lifestyle, and there's much to be said for an attractive, billboard-free village where you can park your car and walk everywhere you need to go. Pastel-color homes with white-picket fences, front-porch rockers, and captain's walks are set along redbrick streets, and all are within walking distance of the town center and its unusual cafés and shops. The community is so reminiscent of a storybook town that producers chose it for the set of the 1998 film The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey.

The community has come into its own in the last few years, achieving a comfortable, lived-in look and feel that had escaped it since its founding in the 1970s: some of the once-shiny tin roofs are starting to rust around the edges, and the foliage has completely matured, creating pockets of privacy and shade. There are also more signs of a real neighborhood with bars, record shops, and bookstores added to the mix. Still, while Seaside's popularity continues to soar, it retains a suspicious sense of Twilight Zone perfection that can weird out some visitors. Summer months can be crowded with the retired-CEO and prep-school-student-and-parent sets, so if you're seeking a little solitude, you might prefer visiting during the off-season—between Labor Day and Memorial Day.