Where can you find a land so sublime it instills in you an almost biblical, yearning delight? Where time slows so dramatically that the direction in which purple, wheat-colored, and yellow grasses blow becomes the indolent object of concentrated fascination? Around low-slung shrubs and flowering succulents, lacy wildflower blooms the size and even shape of a woman’s face, and fields are divided by stands of trees growing in east-west lines perpendicular to the craggy, ever-changing, ever-eroding bluffs of the Pacific Ocean, cliffs that have exfoliated building-sized boulders eroding into the waves.

It’s The Sea Ranch—Google “Sea Ranch” without the “The” and god only knows what detritus will flash up—a place so renowned among architects and landscape architects that one I know hitchhiked there from San Francisco when still in high school. Yet unless you live in the Bay Area and have enough disposable income to invest by rent or purchase in a high-priced second home hours away, you likely have never heard of it.

The Sea Ranch was a 4,500 acre sheep farm draped along a desolate stretch of the Pacific north coast, spreading up the crest of a hill and along ten ocean-side miles until Al Boeke, who died last week, bought it for a real estate concern, hoping to create a development in the vein of early postwar satellite cities in Europe, particularly Sweden, to serve as model of suburban development alternative to American suburban sprawl. In this goal, Boeke failed. The Sea Ranch contains fewer than 2,000 houses (some of them, especially the early ones, 1,000 square feet or less), and is barely a community at all. It contains several recreation centers accessible only to property owners or their renters, a communal barn, a riding stable, and a small airstrip. No school, no gas station. From most parts of the development, the local supermarket is a good fifteen minutes’ drive away.

Though Boeke’s original aspirations for The Sea Ranch failed, it offers a world-class model of a different sort, thanks also to its founder’s vision. Boeke, an architect who at the time was vice president of Oceanic California, Inc., an entity of Dole Foods’ real estate division, bought the parcel and proceeded to assemble a consortium of professionals, including architects, landscape architects, and planners, to collaborate on producing a plan for the ideal way to develop this extraordinary, wind-swept land. A geologist was engaged to study site conditions and make recommendations on how to develop it in a manner that would preserve the rugged coastline.

Nearly a half-century before sustainability became a real estate marketing bullet point, Boeke the developer worked with environmentally-minded professionals such as the architects Charles Moore, Donlyn Lyndon, William Turnbull, and Joseph Esherick, and the landscape architect Lawrence Halperin, on a design that would restore to the mighty hand of nature a land partly denuded by logging and grazing, preserve a 10-mile stretch of the world’s most beautiful coastline for public use, and ensure that any building constructed there would settle into rather than dominate—or, as is more typical—become an eyesore on the land.