We’re building a walkable village 90 mins north of San Francisco!

Imagine living on a college campus. You run into friends just walking to class, and everyone is learning and creating side by side together. Group dinners, creative projects, book clubs, and pickup sports happen spontaneously.

Why only live this way for four years? Wouldn’t kids thrive in a place like that? Able to roam with their friends, and immersed in opportunities to learn, build, and explore?

It would be great to be a parent there, too. Instead of being a chauffeur for your kids, you could give them more freedom and just tell them to be back by dark.

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Why don’t more places like this exist? That’s the question my husband asked the first time I took him to meet my grandma, who lives in a place called Chautauqua.

Chautauqua is the closest thing to this vision that I’ve found. It’s a town of ~8,000 people founded in 1874 in western New York. You can picture it as a sort of cross between a college campus and family summer camp.

Chautauqua was built before the car, so people walk or bike nearly everywhere. This makes it safe for kids to explore, and it’s easy to live an active lifestyle where you actually know your neighbors.

The thing that makes Chautauqua truly unique is that, for 9 weeks every summer, it turns into a sort of mini college campus. Every day, there are dozens of lectures, workshops, performances, and activities in beautiful pavilions scattered throughout town. I’ll never forget that once when I was 8 years old, Jane Goodall came and talked about her work with chimpanzees.

Chautauqua was built during the industrial revolution by great American inventors and entrepreneurs. People like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford summered there with their families. In fact, Chautauqua’s main hotel was the first to be lit by Edison’s light bulbs, and it was wired by Thomas Edison himself!

My fondest childhood memories are the summers I spent at Grandma’s house. I’d sit on the porch reading, and family friends would walk by and stop to chat. Sometimes I’d jump down and join them on their way to a lecture or workshop.

Our vision for Esmeralda is to build a year-round community that takes the best parts of Chautauqua and updates it with the Bay Area’s dynamism, diversity, and culture of invention.

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The “cold start problem” is a challenge for starting any new community. Chautauqua solved this through something I call the “ladder of commitment”. The community began as a temporary gathering in 1874 where everyone camped in tents, and as people returned year after year, a permanent town sprouted up.

We’ve followed this same playbook by organizing a “popup village” called Edge Esmeralda, as a prototype for the village are building. This past June, we gathered 1,300 people in the town of Healdsburg, CA over 30 days for a sort of modern day, ephemeral Chautauqua.

We chose Healdsburg because it is just 15 minutes from the land we are purchasing to build our permanent village. The site is a short bike ride into downtown Cloverdale, a charming small town in north Sonoma County. The property lies within the Alexander Valley AVA, and has beautiful rolling hills surrounded by vineyards.

We started to reach out to key city leaders over a year ago, and we’ve been delighted by the positive response we’ve received from locals. We’re now deep in the diligence phase. If it continues to go well, we will proceed with purchasing the property!

We’d love to hear your ideas for how to make Esmeralda an incredible place to live. Here are a few ways you can get involved:

1. Get updates by subscribing to our mailing list
2. Attend part or all of Edge Esmeralda 2025
3. Other ideas for how you could contribute? Let me know!

Please don’t be a stranger. We look forward to hearing from you!

— Devon & the Esmeralda team