The screen door slams and, while the hook-and-eye closure is still jangling its metallic grace note, the memories arrive. For anyone who has ever spent a summer at the cottage, the effect is almost Pavlovian. But at Veranda Beach, it’s no accident.

"We’ve had long meetings about screen doors," Jim Bankson says. "They’re an important element-it’s got to sound just right." Veranda Beach bills itself as a "1950s-nostalgic community" and, as the general manager of this resort (just across the border from Osoyoos), Bankson well knows the importance of the acoustic properties of screen doors and of having just the right Adirondack chairs for your veranda.

Such details are crucial when you’re trying, as Veranda Beach is, to create "cottage designs reminiscent of the greatest era of the last century"-the 1950s, that is. Think Coca-Cola bottle openers mounted on exterior walls, countertop milkshake machines (fittingly manufactured by Hamilton Beach) and a planned old-school diner. Sitting in one of those screened-in porches, staring out at Lake Osoyoos and drinking a long, tall lemonade, the marketing claims don’t seem particularly far-fetched.

Nostalgia and vacations go hand in hand. Almost as we experience them, holidays are being burnished in our memory. We buy souvenirs (the word is derived from the French verb meaning "to remember"), take photos and send postcards. It makes sense, then, for a resort development like Veranda Beach to use nostalgia as a hook. After all, if a place is about creating memories, why not give folks an objective lesson in how to go about it?

Nostalgia needn’t be simply for a particular era, like Veranda’s fondness for the ’50s. At the Outback, the appeal is more to a timeless ethos. "The spirit of The Outback has always been one of sharing and camping," says Jordan Tetreau, who handles sales and marketing for the resort located just outside Vernon. That spirit goes back to the Trethewey family, owners of the land since the 1960s. "When we were starting sales I often heard people say they were very familiar with the property," Tetreau says. "They’d come out to visit the Tretheweys or were jumping off the cliffs next door at Ellison Provincial Park."

The Outback, then, was already associated with idyllic summers for many visitors. There can hardly be a better starting point for a recreational property development. The Outback expands on those fond associations through such throwback amenities as a picnic area and firepits. (A tunnel blasted through granite to make these areas easily accessible to the whole site is a modern concession to building nostalgia.)

Perhaps the clearest expression of The Outback theme is seen in the Forest Cabins, 37 structures surrounded, as their name implies, by mature trees. "We were going for the real cabin-in-the-woods, camping feel," Tetreau says. In part, this was achieved by not landscaping the area surrounding the cabins-as much as possible, the forest floor was left undisturbed during construction. The woodsy theme extends to the cabins themselves, which have breezeways made of a canvas-like material connecting the main structure to a casita in the back. This bridging of indoor and outdoor space recalls a camping tent (without any of the discomfort), an effect that Tetreau says is particularly striking when the breezeway is lit up at night.

This is a kind of high-class nod to camping, and it’s important to note that nostalgia works best when it vaguely invokes, rather than slavishly replicates, a bygone era. Striking this balance creates some interesting contrasts. When I arrived at Veranda Beach around six o’clock on a Friday evening, staff had left my key in an envelope taped to the door of the administration cabin. That gesture recalled a simpler era, one that quickly faded when I opened the door to a four-bedroom, two-bathroom structure-complete with gas fireplace and dishwasher-that far exceeded my notion of a cottage.

Simon Hudson, a professor in tourism and marketing at the University of Calgary, says these types of appeals work on the emotions, especially those of baby boomers, and some contemporary anxieties. "There is a sense that vacation time is the time we bond," he says. "And there is a trend toward multi-generational holidays -grandparents, parents and children."

In a way, then, places like Veranda Beach and The Outback hold out the promise of community, a place where memories will be made as well as recalled. At Veranda Beach, parking is relegated to the main streets, the cottages are connected by gravel pathways, and the focus is on the more than three-kilometre-long beach. "It’s neat to see everybody in the morning running down to the lake with all their junk," Bankson says.

It is these simple things that prove the ethos of the 1950s has not vanished completely. Last August, Veranda Beach’s Directors of Fun (local teenagers hired to coordinate community activities) held a s’mores night. "They were the biggest hit of the summer," Bankson says. For everyone around the fire, the graham crackers, chocolate and marshmallows were gooey and sweet. But the flavours were probably richer for those in whom the sticky treats brought up bittersweet memories of long-ago summer vacations at the cabin.