There's no place like Naples.

Aficionados have probably made that claim since Walter Haldeman bought the town in 1890 and started inviting his Kentucky friends here for winter getaways.

Haldeman likely wouldn't recognize the Naples of today. Yet, in many ways, the manner in which the community dev-eloped was guided by his actions-and those of the visionaries who followed him. The first-and most influential-was Glen Sample, a Chicago advertising executive who discovered Naples in 1938, recognized its potential and, between that first visit and 1950, bought two square miles of swampland, hammock and beachfront that he turned into Port Royal. Until his death in 1971, Sample retained the right to approve which architects were allowed to design in his community and what those designs could and couldn't entail.

"He was a sharp character as to what was good-looking and what wasn't," recalls Dick Morris, an architect who arrived in 1954 and subsequently designed a number of homes in Port Royal and Aqualane Shores. "There were people he didn't think would fit into Port Royal, and he would buy their lot back from them. He was the king. But, looking back on it, sometimes you need that kind of enlightened authority to make things work."

Because Sample intended Port Royal as Naples' upscale community from the start, he had immense influence on the development of Naples' style. Most early architects have similar memories of his presence and impact. Bill Tracy arrived in 1952, the first genuine architect in town, according to his family. His widow, Helen, remembers Sample driving by their Port Royal home one day and telling them to clean their roof. "He was a scruffy old guy, but I liked him," she says. "Being in the advertising business in Chicago, he wrote his own copy, and I remember him saying this was not the place for swamp renaissance or mud-hut manors."

The Tracys came to Naples on the advice of their investment counselor. "We were getting ready to build a house in Fort Lauderdale, but he said, 'This is where it's going to happen,'" Helen Tracy recalls. "Sample had just opened Port Royal, and lots there were going for the same price as in Old Naples. Everything was very primitive. There was a movie theater where Marissa's is now. It was a Quonset hut left over from World War II, and when it rained you couldn't hear the dialogue. We had to go to Fort Myers for our mortgage. It was a big adjustment for me."

Tracy, greatly influenced by Ber-muda-style architecture, was a contemporary designer. He went on to design nearly 70 homes in Port Royal, as well as the Conservancy's Naples Nature Center and the school in Everglades City. He enjoyed helping to shape Naples, but was less pleased with some of what he saw later.

Tracy's son and namesake recalls, "He was big into worrying about zoning. He used to raise Cain at the building department. He liked Port Royal and Park Shore, but he certainly wouldn't like what he'd see now."

Morris, who worked for Tracy for a few years before opening his own practice with partner Don Nick, shared his mentor's regard for the simple life and for preserving what was here. His proudest achievement, he says, was designing some 300 condominiums and the clubhouse at Wilderness, and working to preserve the natural surroundings of the site.

"It was quite a challenge," Morris reports. "They had this beautiful, lush vegetation and big trees. They laid out the golf course, and then Wes Downing and Earl Frye asked us to do the architecture. I wanted something to go with the woods, so all the buildings had wood and stone as part of their exterior."

Morris' passion for the woods prompted him to convince engineers to clear only a 30-foot-wide swath for the roads within the development, rather than the traditional 60 feet. "I said, 'Why do we need to cut all those trees down? Why can't the pipes go under the street?'" he recalls. "When you go into Wilderness now, you go through some areas where the trees are arching over the street."

Despite that success, Morris preferred working with individuals on homes, where he could sit and talk with the owners to find what they wanted and needed. He also liked the diversity that comes with a neighborhood rather than a development.

"Port Royal really had a diversity of style," he notes, "and I think it's good to have different architects, so you won't have a cookie-cutter approach. I think Port Royal especially set the style for Naples. If Port Royal had become a trailer park instead of an upscale subdivision, the city of Naples might have been totally different."

A fish camp/trailer park did once exist at the end of Gordon Drive. "It was wiped out in Hurricane Donna," Morris says. "Sample jumped in then and got the zoning changed, so that it was the same as Port Royal."

Now retired, Morris has been asked to serve on the city's design review board. He has already advised the council that, if the right criteria are set, both diversity and aesthetic appeal will be ensured. "When I got here in '54, every piece of land was zoned, and commercial property was all in a separate area," he adds. "I think that helped a lot. The city government really set the stage. Early on, the city chose to spend money on landscaping. That said this was tropical Florida and this was a community that cared about its looks."

Morris also worked in areas where commercial land brushed up against residential. One such project was the old Naples Art Gallery along Broad Avenue, where he placed dormers on the second floor. "I put four residential units on top," he explains. "I felt it was a transitional building, so I thought the right thing to do was to give the building a residential feeling."

Despite working in upscale neighborhoods, Morris concentrated mostly on early homes with modest designs encompassing no more than 3,000 square feet. He is astounded by some of what he terms today's "starter castles" that can embody 10 times that space. "I think the style of Naples [as] an upscale community on the beach is already set," he says. "But I do wonder what's going to happen to some of these massive houses when the people can't or don't want to keep up that much space."

Hurricane donna swept into Naples in 1960 and left a new land of opportunity in its wake. Insurance adjusters came to assess the damage and then pumped money into the town. Some even decided to settle here. Word of the little resort community began to spread, and the phenomenon of Port Royal began to stretch beyond Old Naples.

During the '60s, development focus shifted slightly north, to Park Shore, where Ray Lutgert filled in more marsh and mangroves to create a new beachfront community. While high-rises popped up along the shore, the most architecturally remarkable development appeared on the other side of the road, along the bay. The Villages on Venetian Bay were unlike anything else in Naples at the time. Even today, this eye-catching mini-city seems to float on the water. The Villages are the work of Walter Keller, widely regarded by his peers as one of the most important architects in Naples history. Keller moved here in 1959, ready to grow with the area. Although he died in 2001, his projects cover the county, including the Plaza on Third Street South and the World Tennis Center off Airport-Pulling Road.

"He's all over the place," says his widow, Polly Keller. "He worked so closely with clients to try to create their feel and vision."

Bob Batscher, who worked as Keller's field representative, believes that the architect's success resulted not only from design talent but also from a strong work ethic and attention to detail. "He was in the office no later than 4:15 in the morning," Batscher recalls. "He would order out for lunch and take a half hour at his desk, then work until 4 p.m."

By watching Keller's buildings take shape, Batscher developed a feel for what made a design work, whether it was modern or traditional. "The thing I found was that proportion was the most important thing," he says. "Walter's designs were methodical, almost like they were playing a melody. That makes it more like a picture or a song than a building."

Batscher adds that the specifications and details on Keller's plans were extremely thorough. He insisted on having adequate time to develop his plans and that Batscher be on site to make sure that his plans were followed to the letter. "With his clients, he was the greatest guy in the world," Batscher says. "But with the general contractors, they had to toe the line. He was a very different man with them. A grizzly bear and a rattlesnake rolled into one."

Yet Keller had a heart of gold, providing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of pro-bono work to such organizations as the David Lawrence Center and the Humane Society. And he wasn't without his frivolous side. In his own home, built out over water, Keller designed and included a sliding panel in the floor-so he could fish from his easy chair.

Keller had an influence on Bob Forsythe, an architect who moved to Naples in 1968. "He [Keller] was a fine, hard worker and very active in the community," Forsythe says. "I particularly res-pected him and Dick Morris. They treated customers right."

The designer of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Ohio, Forsythe was the associate architect for the Phil-harmonic Center for the Arts (doing all the drawings and overseeing construction) and designed banks and churches, the YMCA and the renovation of the Naples Depot. Forsythe arrived at the request of a group developing the Palm River Country Club. "When they asked me to do that, I didn't even know where Naples was," he recalls. "Naples at that time had two banks and a savings and loan and not many architects. To get anything done, you only had to get three people to approve it-the county attorney, manager and building inspector."

In Port Royal, however, Forsythe, like Morris and Tracy, had to get Sample's approval. "Mr. Sample scared the dickens out of me," he admits with a laugh. "Only a handful of architects were approved [to work there]." Forsythe has the distinction of having designed a home that was rejected by the Port Royal board for being too big. "That would never happen today," he admits.

"Obviously, things were different then," he continues. "One of the first buildings I did in Pelican Bay was a showcase home they used for two or three years. I was given orders. There was to be no Spanish-style architecture in Pelican Bay.

"Everything was pretty ordinary when I first came. Many architects try to invent something absolutely new, but you have to make designs compatible with the area where they're going to be. I didn't come in with any distinctive style. A lot of what we did now looks obsolete, but I think our buildings held their own at the time."

Arriving two years after Forsythe, Mario Lamendola also found a Naples that was still very much a small town. "Most of the homes were Rutenberg," he recalls. "Park Shore was just starting and lots were going for $10,000. I couldn't believe people were paying $10,000 for sand. I was from Illinois, and for $10,000 you got a nice lot with lots of trees."

Lamendola settled in Naples Park, ignoring the comments from locals about being "so far out of town," and opened an office in his home. That siting helped secure his first commission.

"My first really decent job was the Trader Zeke center in Vanderbilt Beach," he says. "Zeke found me because he looked in the telephone book for someone in the neighborhood. From that point, I never had to go out and try to drum up work."

While much of Lamendola's work has been small industrial or commercial projects, the growth of the community afforded him numerous opportunities in buildings that tend to be an early reflection of population increase-churches. In one year, 1979, he had the chance to design St. William's, St. Peter's and St. Eliz-abeth's. "St. William's was the only full church. The others were really multipurpose buildings," he notes.

One of Lamendola's proudest pro-jects: the Bent Pines development off Solana Road. Comprised of modest villas with lofts and nestled among lush vegetation, it offered a chance to do something really different, he says.

Still in practice, Lamendola keeps a photo of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater on the wall of his office. "It keeps me humble," he says.

The 1980s and '90s brought a population boom to Naples, and architects who arrived with the new land rush helped the town grow without losing its charm. Two in particular helped re-establish the town's identity as a special place.

That the city decided to revitalize Fifth Avenue South can largely be traced to Alfred French, who moved here in 1982. Trained in architecture and urban design, French had been heavily involved in the revitalization of downtown Minneapolis. He had served on the urban-design committee of the national AIA (American Institute of Architects), and one of his committee's greatest achievements was the establishment of the Regional/Urban Design Assistance Team (R/UDAT).

"R/UDAT was an all-volunteer, interdisciplinary group," French says. "It could have architects, economists, planners, graphic designers, landscape architects-whatever a community needed."

French, selected as president of the local AIA chapter, asked the national organization to send an R/UDAT team to Naples. Half a dozen professionals (including only one architect) arrived and held a three-day charette, evaluating the town and making recommendations. Among them were to limit buildings to no more than three stories and to revitalize Fifth Avenue.

"That was how Al French and I became such good friends," says Andrea Clark Brown, who arrived around the same time and shared his concerns. "I had a background in planning and was really interested in city planning here. [The visit] was the beginning of my being involved in the fabric of Naples."

Although the R/UDAT plan was temporarily shelved, neither French nor Brown forgot its recommendations. So when the city decided to hire a consultant to look at Fifth Avenue, they supported the move to bring urban planner Andres Duany to town. The two went on to design three of the major cultural landmarks of the street. Brown designed the Sugden Community Theatre, and French designed the Harmon-Meek Gallery (now home to Congress Jewelers) and the von Liebig Art Center.

"I was comfortable with quite large projects," says French, who also redesigned the Gulfview and East Naples middle schools. "And I've always believed front-end planning and programming of the building is probably the most important phase of that building's life. I insisted we talk quite some time."

French faced numerous difficulties with the von Liebig. The city council arbitrarily imposed a 16,000-square-foot limit, for instance. "I knew they needed 18,000 to 20,000 square feet," he says. French resigned himself to the size restriction but insisted on siting the building so it was oriented to both Fifth Avenue and Cambier Park, for aesthetics and to make the structure fully a part of its unique location.

French faced a different challenge with the Harmon-Meek Gallery. The Meeks wanted the gallery to be an enclosed space that people would have to enter in order to view the art. The Duany guidelines, however, called for windows facing Fifth Avenue. "I'd been so involved with the Duany guidelines. I said, 'This can't be a building that violates everything we argued about,'" French explains. "So I came up with a clever solution. We put in windows facing the street, but two feet behind them we put a wall. From the inside, you're completely unaware the windows are there. But it gave a space for art to be displayed and viewed from the street. That's what I call problem-solving."

Brown faced her own challenges with the Sugden, primarily because of the narrowness of the site and the size the building needed to be. But she sees the final design, which won an AIA award, as the culmination of many of the principles she had been developing in other projects through the years, including the play of light and color-both inside and in the plaza out front, which she also designed.

"The Sugden was the convergence of a lot of wonderful studies," she says. "Even the porch out front. I went way back into the history of public design and made sure the scale of the trees would take on the same scale as the theater's columns. I'm always interested in doing something with a contemporary feel, but one informed by the nature of the place. And I like having the landscape be part of the building-mimicking shapes and textures, climbing it, walking through it."

Architecturally, Naples was still flat when Brown and French arrived, but the aftermath of the 1980s recession seemed to bring a wave of change. Flood maps changed after that, which raised houses, making them seem larger. That, in turn, led to even larger homes, often running from lot line to lot line. Ceilings started to reach for the sky, rising from the traditional eight feet to 10 and higher.

"The Italian traditional look responded well to that change of scale," Brown notes. "And that style came to represent a high-end home with a rich history. These [larger] homes also represented greater security that they would make it through the hard weather here."

Despite the larger scale of houses, Naples' downtown retained its charm, largely because of existing planning and zoning. "One of the blessings for Naples was that it was established shortly before the turn of the 19th century, with an historical grid street plan," French says. "They're wonderful. The 19th-century traditional town planning has been far more successful than 20th-century town planning. Before the huge suburban development plan hit Naples, the grid was already established."

Although pleased with downtown redevelopment, Brown and French are concerned about the rest of Naples. French points to the proliferation of strip malls to the east and north.

"I think at this point in time, the only solution is to go back to Duany's principles of creating little villages and communities," he says. "Unless someone has the foresight and the ability to acquire land to do this to the north and east, we're not going to have anything other than urban sprawl."

Brown agrees that unrestrained growth may lead to Naples' becoming more like other big cities, but adds that paying attention to the unique nature here can help Naples retain its special character. "We keep harping on design standards for buildings, but if we had standards for landscaping, the buildings wouldn't matter," she says. "The best architecture in Naples is the landscape. That's as informative to me as any building. Green is what will save us."

Brown's conviction speaks to one of the guiding principles of architecture: Make sure the design is compatible with the site. By paying attention to and incorporating the unique nature of Naples, the architects of today can help preserve Naples' style.