Grayton Beach Homes for Sale

Living in Grayton Beach

Grayton Beach begins with a homestead: Army Major Charles T. Gray built on this stretch of coast in 1885, and five years later William Miller and William Wilson moved their families in and mapped where the village's streets and blocks would be built, naming the place for Gray. Walton County's tourism department records the next chapter. W. H. Butler and his son Van arrived from DeFuniak Springs in 1913, bought most of what is now Grayton Beach, built and rented cottages, and ran the town's general store and a dance hall on the site the Red Bar occupies today. Only one building, the two-story Wash-A-Way at the end of County Road 283, is thought to date to the town's beginning. What shapes Grayton now is what surrounds it. The state used its land east of town to create Grayton Beach State Recreation Area in 1967, and in 1985, after years of lobbying by residents, Florida bought the village's beachfront along with the dunes and forest to the west and north. Florida State Parks describes the park as bordering the township on every side but the south, where the Gulf does. Inside that ring sit Western Lake, a coastal dune lake open to fishing and paddling that the United States Geological Survey's national hydrography record maps at about 227 acres, four miles of park trails through a coastal forest of scrub oaks and magnolias, and a walkable center of galleries and restaurants that the county describes as a time capsule of the town's early bohemian culture. Florida State Parks gives the lake as 100 acres; the acreage on this page is the federal figure for the whole waterbody, which reaches beyond the park's own boundary. The town also has rules written for it alone. Walton County adopted the Grayton Beach Neighborhood Plan on February 10, 2015 as an overlay to its land development code, mapped at roughly 104 acres and defined by the plan as the ground between County Road 30-A on the north, the Gulf on the south, Grayton Dunes State Park on the west, and Grayton Beach State Park and Western Lake on the east, excluding Lake Place at Grayton Beach. Its stated purpose is to preserve the town as it stands and the predominantly single-family designation it carries on the county's future land use map. It leaves setbacks, build-to-lines and lot coverage to the land development code except on lots abutting alleys, where a rear setback may come down from 15 feet to 5 feet; it carries forward the county's 40 foot height ceiling measured above the mean elevation of a parcel; it freezes lot sizes at what the recorded plat and the property appraiser's roll held on the adoption date and bars further division; it asks that street widths, block sizes and unpaved alleys stay as the plat drew them; and it limits a rental sign to four square feet mounted on the house or a fence. It deliberately imposes no architectural controls and no landscaping requirements. Renovation and rental questions run through that overlay, the rest of Walton County's land development code, and each parcel's recorded covenants, so read all three for the specific address rather than assuming the town carries none.

• Grayton Beach State Park on three sides
• Western Lake coastal dune lake
• Four miles of park trails
• Galleries and the town center