From where I sit when I write, I can see the hamlet of Andes, New York, a small town (population 1,301) nestled between steep hills. This house I share with my husband, Ed Kratt, sits near the top of one of those hills, on roughly 50 acres that were once part of a dairy farm. The farmers who owned the property, and whose cows continued to graze on it long after we bought it, still hay the fields, stockpiling silage to feed their herd in winter.
What I can’t see from here, but often imagine, is the straight line that links this spot in New York’s Catskill Mountains to an unconventional—and largely inexplicable—subdivision called Prospect New Town in Longmont, Colorado. I first visited the development in 2001, when I was editor-in-chief of Dwell, and learned that the developer, an iconoclastic Texan named Kiki Wallace, and the development’s lead architect, Mark Sofield,
