Going Modern in Texas

By NANCY KEATES

Dallas

Some residential suburban communities insist on tiled roofs; others dictate color palettes and lot sizes. Often, the goal is to capture the look of a time in the past, before modern living and high housing costs changed tastes and materials.

But a small number of new developments is taking the opposite tack. Here, buried amongst a middle-class community and near the Central Expressway, is a street where the construction of Colonials and Tudors is expressly forbidden. Even mid-century modern is considered passé. "Make no mistake. It's a dictatorship and I make the rules," project developer Diane Cheatham says half-jokingly.

The result is Urban Reserve, a 13-acre development devoted to contemporary design. Pass a neighborhood of standard issue brick tract ranches and turn onto Vanguard Way and suddenly one confronts what looks like scene from a science fiction movie.

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