Butterfly Garden Neighborhood District
The Butterfly Garden Neighborhood District of Gardinya Lyra is the poshest spot in the city. There is a reason it is called the 1st neighborhood district.
The architecture in this neighborhood is very distantly uniform in their classic storybook like look. Six hundred years out from the Romantic era, buildings here are still built in the ornate style – incorporating the most intricate of gables, iron-gold railings, and finials – the whole neighborhood speaks to the celebration of excess. The building are all the same white stone on the bottom floors, with white clapboard on all upper floors. The asymmetrical roofs are all tiled a light-orange terracotta. The buildings all have brightly colored window boxes, filled with the most exotic flowers. The Morrow family building is especially known for this, Councilman Winnie taking special pride in her hyper hydrangea bushes, the seeds of which were brought from her husband from the other side of the Beyond Mountains. The restrictions on building in this part of the city are some of the most regulated the kingdom has seen.
Butterfly Garden Neighborhood has some of the prettiest gardens in the whole city, especially around Honey Bee Hive Park (the neighborhood’s prize jewel). It has two of the best beaches in the city, in Marigold and Brightin Beaches. And while the jewel that is Brightin Beach is controversially just for residents of the neighborhood, Marigold is a popular attraction to people all over the city, especially during the lunch hours, as some of the best little pop-up dining is set up all along the beach path, and people from all around will spend their lunch hour eating a relaxing meal with their toes in the white sand.
Apartments here are both larger, especially compared to the small tenement-style dwellings in Old Pastel Town, and their cost is considerably more expensive. This is the old money part of town, and while not the most fashionable (that would be Thousand Arches) a Butterfly Garden address is the clearest status symbol one can possess. Families own blocks of apartment buildings, and pass them down from generation to generation, while in other parts of the city homes are merely rented. When children in other parts of the city will have to move out to a completely different building once they’ve reached the start of the age of majority. Not in Butterfly Garden. There it is a point of pride in the residents that their children can move next door into an apartment the family already owns. This is in part of the tension between Butterfly Garden residents and the rest of the city; these residents are seen as spoiled children who had everything handed to them, and never had to set out on their own two feet (this is especially felt in the bordering neighborhood of Northern Pine Ranch).
The residents of Butterfly Garden are all old money families that have been living in that area for hundreds of years. They are mostly business owners, wealthy merchants, and highly trained professionals. Homes in this neighborhood stay in families and rarely go up for sale. In fact, the last family that moved in, the Koliyda family, last came in 1840 with the building of the university. (Ensin Koliyda was a doctor from Raea who was recruited to be the first Dean on the University’s Teaching Hospital). Other notable residents of Butterfly Garden are the Morrow family (in government and trade) and the Denton family (archivists).
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