A few years back Jon Long got lucky. A Calgarian who helped pioneer snowboard videos and then moved on to make Extreme, one of the highest-grossing IMAX movies of all time, was in Hawaii shooting a film on big-wave surfers when he got slammed by the storm of the century. Blond dude after blond dude crashing through 14-metre waves was ideal for the project, of course, but it also meant Long owned some of the wildest storm footage ever captured, which led him to call up a contact at PBS. "How soon can you meet?" he was asked after describing the documentary he wanted to make. Long, by this time living in Nelson, British Columbia, said he could make it to New York in about three weeks. "No, no," said the PBS guy. "There." Scant days later, the suits arrived in town and Long had barely launched into his sales pitch when they waved him off. "Great," he was told. "We’ll take it. Now let’s go see Nelson."

At about the same time, the area’s appeal was being discovered by another citizen of the world. The thick resumé of Englishman Oliver Berkeley includes time spent in corporate finance, a spell as a corporate change agent, several years doing development work in Africa and a stint helping to reorganize the International Red Cross. He’d moved on to managing an enterprise that restored historic buildings in Italy, but wherever he went he kept running into people talking up this place in Canada called Nelson. He finally arranged a trip there to take snowboard lessons and promptly fell in love-with Nelson, sure, but also with a woman who’d grown up there, whom he soon married and relocated to join.

Berkeley took to developing small real estate projects; Long had his films; but neither could shake the idea that Nelson attracts certain kinds of people the way that fish draw bears. By 2004 the two were spending long hours in Berkeley’s boat, cruising up and down Kootenay Lake looking for land to develop, their goal being a community populated by people a lot like themselves. Soon enough they found their parcel: a 200-hectare-plus chunk of shoreline and mountainside on a point overlooking the junction of Kootenay Lake and its west arm. Today the community they envisioned is taking shape.

On the face of it, Kootenay Lake Village is just one of the dozens (if not hundreds) of developments that are popping up throughout rural British Columbia and western Alberta, transforming not just the countryside but the retirement and relocation prospects for people from all over. On closer examination, Long and Berkeley’s project proves to be anything but conventional. On the contrary, it’s a study in how land development and community building might be carried on in a parallel universe.

The otherworldliness begins in Nelson, a town of 10,000 or so, where lunch choices include a vegan raw food café and sushi joints. The drive out of town begins innocently. After a short ferry ride to the village of Procter, on the lightly populated east shore of the Kootenay Lake’s west arm, it veers toward the twilight zone. "We don’t like long, straight, flat roads," explains Berkeley. "We like bumpy, curved, dangerous roads."

On the main route in, the partners did concede the need for a bulldozer, but virtually all other land clearing was done by hand, so as not to disturb the vegetation. The crew they hired included several artists, whom they encouraged to create site-specific art installations, their media being the debris they had cleared.

But while whimsy has its place, that place is not everywhere. Long’s father is an architect and planner and his sister is a partner in the landscape architecture firm currently working on Vancouver’s 2010 athletes’ village, so perhaps it’s not surprising that he and Berkeley took on an active planning role. "Every lot, every tree, every building site was debated," says Berkeley. "That’s good in the long run, but it has put us behind the eight ball."

Still, the partners were able to launch the first three phases of what will ultimately be about 100 homes in 2006 and 2007, with another two phases to follow this summer and fall. Initially Long liked the idea of co-housing or some other creative solution to keep prices affordable. "I wanted a place my friends could afford," he says. But the creative solution has turned out to be the old-fashioned one of relatively low prices, beginning at less than $200,000 for lots away from the water. The first 14 of these were snapped up by the first 14 people on their priority list, even as more expensive waterfront lots (in the $500,000-plus range) proved a harder sell.

While the development will not threaten the dominance of the single-family home, in many ways it is decidedly 2.0. Well over half the acreage is being left as park, a thick, coastal-style forest of fir and fern accessible via a network of mountain bike-ready paths. (The property butts up against a vast, undisturbed forest reserve so the paths don’t necessarily stop at the community’s boundaries.) On the 40 percent of the property that will be inhabited, guidelines restrict building materials and practices, going well beyond the usual to include items such as "locally produced materials to support the local economy" and "use of building products that require less energy to manufacture." The strictest rules apply to clearing natural vegetation, which is virtually forbidden outside the designated building sites.

Wary of their homogenizing effect, the pair have not inflicted tight design controls, but it’s clear their aesthetic vision is closer to Dwell magazine than to Mountain Living. Approved architects and suppliers include Florian Maurer, who won a British Columbia Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Architecture for a low-cost modernist home in Naramata (profiled in Western Living in 2006), and Open Space Architecture, a North Vancouver firm that’s bringing a sleeker, more nuanced feel to Western Canadian resort communities. Open Space’s Don Gurney, who consulted on the development’s master plan, sums up Kootenay Lake Village as having a "creative, West Coast contemporary sensibility."

The development is not yet everything Long and Berkeley envisioned. A mere 100 homes are unlikely to support the small commercial centre they’d hoped to create as a means of building community and reducing the need for motor vehicles. A potential lodge built on the point where the west arm joins the main lake would help, but that is likely years away. One promising sign can be found in the nature of the buyers who’ve been attracted to the development. Two-thirds were expected to be recreational users. In fact, almost all are planning to relocate full-time. "When the right person finds us," says Long, "it’s pretty much automatic they’ll buy in."