Stretching for several hundred feet along Park Street, the wall (technically two walls — one along the sidewalk, with an identical one terraced above it) marks the beginning of construction on a 109-unit residential development on a three-acre site a short walk from the heart of downtown.

Called Merritt Village, the development will consist of four buildings with 59 rental apartments starting at about $3,500 a month and 50 condominiums starting at around $1.2 million, according to the builder, Arnold Karp, the president of Karp Associates, based in New Canaan, and a developing partner in the project.

Artist renderings promoting the development online appear to show a stacked stone wall along the Park Street perimeter. But the actual structure, which functions as a retaining wall, is concrete. Its face is textured to look like it is constructed of individual pieces, an effect created by a mold when the concrete was poured. It is this manufactured “faux-stone” look, as the planning commission chairman has called it, that especially irritates critics. In an affluent community that prides itself on appearances, a prominent faux-stone wall appears glaringly out of context to some residents.

“It’s an embarrassment to New Canaan, which has beautiful fieldstone walls all over town,” said Alan Goldberg, an architect who has lived there for decades. “There are patterns that repeat every eight feet or so. And it’s all uniform in color. It should never have happened.”

Constance MacDougall, in an email to the Planning and Zoning Commission, called it an “insult” to the town’s colonial tradition, “a mind-numbing monochromatic gray cartoon of a wall devoid of any visual element that would give it a measure of compatibility to the landscape on which it sits.”