Town? Country? YES.

A new Charleston hotel makes it plain: This place is made for traveling, happily between worlds.

- KLARA GLOWCZEWSKA

"Let me tell you about my morning Sunday last," says Casey Lavin, the president of Beemok Hospitality Collection, billionaire Ben Navarro's Charleston-based development group. Lavin is a Charlestonian of fairly recent vintage, and he's not the least jaded about its charms. "I woke up at 6:30 a.m. and took my daughter out to Sullivan's Island, 10 minutes from our house, to watch sea turtles hatch and crawl to the water. A half hour later I was in downtown Charleston in a historic church. Right after that I was having brunch in one of the best restaurants in America, and two hours after that I was taking a nap under a huge live oak tree. It's a bizarre environment."

Charleston's out-of-the-ordinariness is what keeps me coming back here, which I do so often (this September was my seventh visit in eight years) I now consider myself something between a beenya (Gullah Geechee for a person who's been in the South Carolina Lowcountry for a long time) and a comeya, a newcomer. The latter cohort has been growing by leaps and bounds, especially over the last five years, drawn (to visit or to settle) by that uniquely Charlestonian mix: on the one hand, a vast rural playground (90 miles of Atlantic Ocean beach and swaths of tidal salt marsh teeming with waterways and wildlife), and on the other, a sophisticated urban core, an eightsquare-mile peninsula studded with the biggest concentration of meticulously maintained historic buildings in the United States, plus serious cultural and gastronomic pleasures.

"It's a once-in-a-generation phenomenon," Lavin marvels, "to have a place evolve with this kind of easy connectivity. You can stay in the country, and 20 miles away you've got this...thing I'm putting that lifestyle to the test, prompted by new developments in both Charleston's environs and in the city proper. That's the other thing about Charleston: You think you know this small place after many visits, but that turns out never to be true.