Except when they go grocery shopping and drive past it.
It's not a stay-cation, exactly - to use the trendy new term for taking time off but enjoying the attractions right at home. It's more of a partway-cation: choosing a summer home less than 30 minutes from one's primary residence.
Why? It's simple, said Kingsley, whose fam ily is one of 86 at last count to have bought a cottage at the two-year-old Summer Village at the Pond development in Westford. "My wife and I realized that as our kids got older, they were only going to have more activities scheduled around home. By vacationing so close by, they don't have to miss out on baseball games or dance recitals or anything like that."
It is exactly this kind of response that developer David Guthrie was banking on when he developed the gated Summer Village at the Pond, comprising some 275 seasonal cottages centered around a recreation facility with two pools, a fitness center, and numerous other amenities.
Guthrie had reason to be optimistic about his prospects: A business partner had done the same thing in Wells, Maine, with good results. Similar planned cottage communities have recently cropped up in Point Sebago, Maine, and in Ipswich. And a place like Summer Village offers the kind of neighborhood ambience that so many suburban families say they no longer find in their own communities these days.
"The kids here ride their bikes together all day long," said Kingsley. "You don't see that anymore in most neighborhoods."
Indeed, the orchestrated sense of community comes up frequently when cottage owners talk about why they like the concept. The grounds at Summer Village include numerous gathering spots where residents can congregate to enjoy one another's company.
Like many of the other residents, Margaret Ann Gray, an administrator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, never intended to buy a summer place so close to her Belmont home; when she decided that she would like a second home for vacations, she started looking in New Hampshire and Maine.
