By In every town or city, there are the places that everyone dreams of living. There might be an amazing park nearby. Or perhaps a certain road offers the best view of the skyline. Maybe some group of homes were built back in a time when builders weren’t incentivized to maximize square footage while minimizing lot size. Something about these areas speaks to people, and it shows. The properties are expensive, yes, but they’re also rarely available.
Pawleys Island is no exception. There are communities and sub-communities and areas within communities that are truly the cream of the crop. People who have lived here their whole lives talk about how how they’ve dreamed of living in these places. Because this beautiful area is all about availability to natural resources, this list reflects accessibility to key attractions, but it has to go beyond that.
I will say, this list is very biased. This is my personal list, compiled from living here for over 20 years. I still spend time every weekend looking at real estate listings, hoping for a property in one of these areas to open up and give me a glimpse of what I could have.
I am also biased against gated communities. For me personally, ensuring my friends, family, and community have easy access to the place I live has always been more important to me than the sense of safety provided by gated access. Beyond that, because of my own lack of access, I haven’t been able to spend much time exploring the gated communities. Even so, I can recognize when a property is beautiful, and some gated areas have made the list.
Without further ado, here is what I consider to be the best of the best of the places to live in Pawleys Island.
Rossdhu and Lower Waverly
Travel into the Chapel Creek community on Waverly Road, and you’ll come to a beautiful stretch of live oaks flanking the road. To the left, you’ll see cow fields, which feel out of place in this area. Just before the cow fields is Rossdhu Avenue, an unassuming, private dirt road that heads west from Waverly. At the end of this road, and following the water to the north, are the subcommunities of Rossdhu and Lower Waverly.
These homes all border either an impoundment or a creek on the eastern side of an impoundment off of the deep-water Waccamaw river. Most if not all of the homes have direct access to this waterway, which provides larger vessels all-tide access to the river and the bay or even ocean beyond. The aquatic plants that face the other side of the canal house tons of birds and wildlife that you can see year round. The homes themselves are set high on a bluff above the water that grants sweeping views of the impoundment and river, perfect for watching sunsets. This bluff also forms a natural embankment, protecting these homes from even the highest tides. That magical combination - direct access to the water with protection from floods - we’ll see again.
You won’t find any McMansions in this area. Instead, most of the homes in this small stretch have great architectural beauty, with unique features befitting houses of their size. The lots are large estate lots, with numerous old-growth oak and other trees. Some of the homes on Rossdhu back up to the cowfields; these homes have river access via shared dock space.
The crowning jewel of this area is the property that includes the cowfields themselves, a 40-some acre tract with a beautiful home set high on the bluff above the water. This may be, in my humble opinion, the nicest property in Pawleys Island.
Windover Drive and Cricket Loop (North Litchfield)
Let’s move from the river to the beach (don’t worry, we’ll come back to the river!). North Litchfield is a lovely community in its own right, but within it is an extremely private haven with access to the nearly-private north end of the beach: Windover Drive and its offshoot Cricket Loop.
Windover Drive is the road that runs east-west at the northern end of North Litchfield. What makes it so special is that the homes on Windover back up to the undeveloped south end of Huntington Beach State Park. That means that these homes will never have any development behind them. It also means that you have access to the undisturbed forest, a serene place to roam or take in some wildlife.
Couple that privacy with a short walk or golf cart ride to the north-end beach access, and you’ve got some of the most desirable beach-adjacent properties in Pawleys. As you move a bit away from the beach itself, these homes are higher and more protected from flooding than a beachfront property would be. You also get more space, and more green border from your neighbors. In my opinion, this is best of both worlds: easy access to the beach (and Huntington Beach beyond) with some degree of flood protection and adjacent forest.
Old Waccamaw Drive and Emerson Loop (Hagley)
When I was a kid, I would ride my bike down to Hagley Landing to swim or look for artifacts. Just before the landing, Old Waccamaw Drive cut across the road, with beautiful large homes on either side, with their docks jutting out into the river clearly visible from the landing. This is where I thought the people who truly had it all lived.
My opinion hasn’t really changed much. Old Waccamaw to the south rises up a steep bluff much like the one in Rossdhu. Like those homes, this bluff protects these homes from flooding. Unlike the homes in Rossdhu though, these homes have direct, deep-water access to the river. Many or most have long structural docks that stretch to the deeper part of the river. Many have boat houses and lifts that protect their vessels. This is in my opinion one of the absolute greatest attractions in Pawleys, and these folks have a front row seat.
The homes on Old Waccamaw and Emerson are a mix of older homes, built a generation or so a go, and newer homes that are slowly replacing the smaller, older homes that date back to a time when this land was more affordable. Like Rossdhu Avenue, these roads are not all paved, though they are public roads in this case.
If I could pick one place I’d move from where I am now, it would be to the homes on the bluff on Old Waccamaw.
Inlet Point
I’ve already spoken at length about Inlet Point on the neighborhood page, but allow me to give my unrestricted thoughts. Inlet Point, and especially the houses at the south end of Norris Drive, where the houses have both ocean and creek views, has great appeal for me. It has direct access to one of my favorite places in the world, Midway Inlet, the inlet between South Litchfield and Pawleys Island.
When I was a boy, we used to come down here as a family and splash in the creek, dig for clams (don’t eat them though!), and have a wonderful time. As a grown man, I love walking down, seeing the birds fishing in the inlet, and catching a fish or two if I’m lucky. The last time I was down there, a loggerhead sea turtle swam right up to me. I never go there and don’t have an amazing experience.
Because of all that, and because of the amazing views, and because of the amazing access to both creek and ocean, I have to include Inlet Point on this list. But, and it’s a big but, I have firsthand seen how storms and rising waters have damaged the homes, eroded the dunes, and generally wrought havoc on this small spit of land. The rumor I’ve heard is that all of these beaches - Pawleys, South and North Litchfield - are all part of a shifting set of barrier islands. The natural process of these islands is to erode and sometimes disappear, only to accrete and create a new island elsewhere. If you look at old maps of the area, you’ll see the inlets have moved since.
So I include Inlet Point because I would in fact love to live there, but I hesitate to include it because it’s a lot of work and maintenance to keep these properties in shape. If you’ve got the money to live here, maybe that doesn’t matter to you. Inlet Point is also a gated community, but I won’t hold that against it.
Prince George Riverside
Also in the gated community set is Prince George Riverside, the half (by acreage) of Prince George west of Highway 17. Both sides of the Prince George community are beautiful, situated on some lovely land south of town. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the Riverside includes the magical combination of deep water river access and a high protective bluff.
Unlike the earlier river-facing properties, Prince George has a marina with 28 deeded slips for access to the Intercoastal Waterway, with none of the homes having docks of their own. This undeniably keeps the wetland side pristine for sweeping views. Riverside also includes some very nice amenities, including a clubhouse along the river, with a boardwalk.
One of my favorite aspects of Prince George is how they’ve allotted land use: the lots are all huge estate lots, and there is a small fixed number of them. The smallest lot in Riverside is three acres, and the largest is an amazing 11 acres. All that greenspace, the undeveloped land around it, and the wetlands mean serious wildlife opportunities, with tons of deer, turkey, waterfowl, and other animals.