Seabrook: a Modern Town on the Wild Washington Coast

When Casey and Laura Roloff started planning on having children, they wanted to live in a place that felt small-town with plenty of neighbor interaction, where walking everywhere was normal.

They wanted modern amenities and a beautiful location. Inspired by their experience building custom houses on the Oregon coast and by what they’d seen in Seaside, Florida, the Roloffs rolled up their sleeves and built their own town on the Washington coast. It’s called Seabrook. 

“We're the crazy people who decided to build our own town a little over 20 years ago,” said Casey Roloff.

The journey into homebuilding began with a house-painting business during college. After graduating, the Roloffs moved to a small town on the Oregon coast between Lincoln City and Depoe Bay. Inspired by Sarah Susanka's best-selling book, The Not So Big House, the Roloffs decided to design and build custom houses. “Susanka was the architect who…basically taught the fundamentals of designing more intentional spaces,” he said. “Kind of a less-is-more approach to house design.”

Financed by a high-risk loan fund, the Roloffs built their first house in 1995. “It sold almost immediately,” he said. Word of mouth led to more orders and eventually 25 houses. “Each one was custom and had a lot of thought put into them. Then we started thinking: What if we design our own neighborhood?”

Seaside, Florida, inspired them because it started as 80 acres on the Florida panhandle that nobody seemed to want to develop and evolved into a bustling town full of valuable properties. Plus it had all the comfortable features that the Roloffs wanted for their own town. 

“Why did we stop building towns like Nantucket and Carmel and Santa Barbara and Bozeman?  Once the car was introduced, we started to go away from designing at a human scale, a walkable scale, where we could meet all of our basic needs on foot—to getting into our car and driving to everything. Seaside inspired people all around the world to think differently about development and go back to the way we used to design.”

In 1999, Casey and Laura met with the founders of Seaside, who offered to share their playbook. They tested the ideas with a neglected property south of Salishan, Oregon, which had been listed for $1.1 million for the previous 10 years. “Nobody wanted it,” Roloff recalled. “We said that we thought we could do something special with it.”

Back to the high-risk loan company they went, but they needed more money to buy the land and build infrastructure and houses. After getting turned down by almost a dozen banks, the Roloffs finally found one that would front the additional funds. “In the first 90 days,” he said, “we sold about half the community, and we paid off our bank loan in four months. So the little experiment was working.”

Then, Roloff said, “I turned my wife and said, ‘Laura, we're gonna have to build our own town;  we're running out of lots.’”

The couple’s search for the perfect plot to build their town began.

The journey took them across the Columbia River into Washington, where the coast was far less developed. 

“We couldn't understand why there wasn't a great beach town closer to Seattle, Bellevue, Tacoma, and Redmond,” he said. “In college, we would backpack in Olympic National Park, and we just fell in love with this whole [Olympic] peninsula.” 

Research showed that the Washington coast would be ideal. Census data revealed that compared to the popular Cannon Beach area in Oregon, in Washington, within a three-hour drive from the Seattle metropolitan area, there was double the population and five times more household wealth in that three-hour drive area. About 80% of second home buyers want to own another house within four hours’ drive of their main residence, Roloff said. And the Washington coast was relatively undeveloped, with one lodging unit to every 10 units on the Oregon coast. There were other factors, including that developed areas on the southwest Washington coast were relatively flat and not as appealingly rugged as much of the Oregon coast. These areas also had been developed decades ago in typical suburban fashion, with a focus on car travel and few sidewalks and main street environments. While some claimed that the weather was worse in Washington compared to Oregon, weather data showed this not to be true. “In fact, our summers are two degrees warmer than Carmel, California, which usually surprises people,” Roloff said.

Starting with the purchase of 250 acres between Pacific Beach and Ocean Grove for $2.5 million, the Roloffs began building their new town, Seabrook. They now own 730 acres and are continuing to expand from the 600 homes that were finished as of early this year. About half of the homes are primary residences or retirement properties, with some second homes. The other half are in Seabrook’s rental program, although many of the owners of second homes rent them out when they aren’t using them.

In 2020, the average rental home generated $41,000 in revenue, and that climbed to $60,000 in 2024. Income growth per rental home is about 10% per year, said Roloff. “Even though we're adding more homes every year, the average homes are still increasing in revenue.”

Having developed Seabrook for more than 30 years, the Roloffs are thankful for the sense of community that envelops the town. “We also didn't take on a lot of debt,” he said. “We do things very slow and steady. We raised our families here, not just myself, but my CFO, my head of sales, our director of town development. We live here, this is our life. It's not just about selling houses for us.”

Seabrook isn’t just a community of cookie-cutter condominiums, townhouses, and single-family homes with vacation rentals arranged by a third party such as Airbnb or VRBO. Rental guests have to check in at the Seabrook front desk, where their credentials are carefully checked. “In the vacation rental business,” Roloff said, “a lot of parents will book homes for their kids to have a party at the beach. That doesn't happen here, because we have 24-hour security, 365 [days a year], and we take the service seriously.” That service includes quick response to any problems with a rental. “Let's just say you show up to the house, you brought a bunch of groceries, and the refrigerator goes out. We'll replace the refrigerator within 30 minutes to make sure that you don’t lose anything. Those are things that most vacation rental companies just can't do.”

Something else that rental companies can’t do is build a tightly knit, walkable, and human-centered community. Seabrook’s design is intentionally focused on keeping cars parked and making residents and visitors want to walk and bicycle around. “Rain or shine, you go to a place like Amsterdam,” Roloff said, “and it doesn't matter if it's raining or not. People are riding bikes everywhere and running around, and you just have to have the right clothing on. We want this to kind of become the Amsterdam of the West Coast, especially from a cycling perspective, because as the town gets bigger, being on a bicycle is going to be the easiest way to get around town.”

Visitors to Seabrook might find that it feels visually pleasing without knowing why, and this has to do with architectural variety and housing types. Seabrook real estate buyers can choose from small standalone homes to condominiums, some built above retail shops, to townhouses and penthouses, and large family homes. “The reason we like to travel to old towns and walk through old cities is that there's so much variety in the housing and the architecture,” he said. “It's interesting. It keeps our attention versus suburbia, where you go through a neighborhood and there might be six floor plans and three colors of beige, it's just very monotonous. It doesn't have a lot of variety. Variety is what creates a great pedestrian experience, because you can see a lot of different things, rather than just seeing the same thing over and over.” 

Another aspect of Seabrook’s design appeal is the transect, which Roloff explained “is the transition that happen from urban to nature.” From the center of town and its shops and restaurants and more dense housing to the outskirts, Seabrook gradually changes. “As we leave the town, we transition into a more natural, less dense, less infrastructure [design]. Concrete sidewalks morph into oyster-shell pathways, into chip pathways, and you feel nature starting to take over. When you're in a great old town, you can walk from the center of town into the countryside in a 10- to 15-minute walk. That is by design. So we naturally built in a way that kept the pedestrian interested and engaged. No street looks the same, and the transect is what helps that happen.”

Seabrook’s design also emphasizes “third places,” which is where unstructured activities take place, apart from the house or workplace. “It's the park, the courtyard, the piazza, the square, the coffee shop,” Roloff said, “or just going grocery shopping with a friend or a neighbor, all of these places are third places. These third places have been removed out of our neighborhoods, and it's become more about our lot and our house, and it doesn't connect us very well to our neighbor.

“The idea of great places is there's third places everywhere, and they’re extensions of your living room, extensions of your yard. Instead of having the big yard, we have shared spaces that we maintain as a common area, and we meet each other and run into each other, and kids run into each other.”

Interspersed within Seabrook are 600 acres of public land with 25 miles of hiking and mountain biking trails, and this will be doubled over the next four years.

In terms of amenities, the Seabrook town center will also be doubling in size over the next few years, with an investment of $120 million. On tap are a school, a medical center, a community center, and a private beach club, along with more new neighborhoods, shops, and restaurants. “We're not just trying to build a town that looks great, we want it to also taste great, and we want there to be shops that you want to go and spend time in,” said Roloff. “They are growing as the town grows, and doing very, very well.” 

To help keep Seabrook sustainable, it owns an 80-acre regenerative farm, which takes compost from the residents and restaurants to nurture vegetables grown on the farm, which are sold to the restaurants and grocery store.

While Seabrook is a reasonable drive, about three hours, from the Seattle or Portland metro areas, it is possible to fly privately to a nearby airport. For adventurous aviators, Copalis State Airport (S16) is the closest to Seabrook, but it is an unusual airstrip, being the only public beach airport in Washington State. You can’t park an airplane there overnight due to the tides but you certainly could get dropped off there using its roughly 3,000-foot sand airstrip, and it’s just a short five-mile drive to Seabrook, which has a shuttle bus to pick up visitors.

Ocean Shores Municipal (W04) has a decent 3,100-foot paved runway but few services, and it is about 30 minutes from Seabrook.

Many business jets can safely operate from Bowerman Field (KHQM) in Hoquiam, which has a 5,000-foot runway and an FBO run by the Port of Grays Harbor. Although a little further than Ocean Shores, it’s just a 35-minute drive, and Seabrook will send the shuttle to pick up guests at Bowerman or help arrange for a rental car.

A frequent visitor (he declined to be identified) who often flies privately recommends using the local airports when private travel is available, instead of airlining to Seattle or Portland. The rental properties at Seabrook range from small houses that sleep four to studio condos and townhouses, and at the top of the range, large houses next to the beach that can accommodate two dozen people. “There’s a whole variation on size and the level of luxury,” he said. “There’s something special about Seabrook.”