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Hanif Wondir

When the city of Seaside, Calif., ordered resident Etienne Constable to build a fence to cover the boat parked in his driveway, he complied. But the puckish way he did it — hiring his artist neighbor to paint a realistic mural of the same exact boat on his fence — has brought him viral attention.

“We kind of hit the sweet spot between following the rules and making an elegant statement to the contrary,” says Constable.

Constable, who works in business development, has lived in the same house in Seaside for 29 years. For most of that time, his boat trailer — often with a boat attached — has sat in his driveway without issue. But in July 2023, he received a letter from the city, asserting that the <a href="https://www.codepublishing.com/CA/Seaside/#!/Seaside17/Seaside1734.html#17.34.150" target=_blank>municipal code</a> requires that boats and trailers be “screened on the side and front by a six-foot-high fence,” and threatening him with a citation and a $100 fine if he failed to comply. (The Washington Post has reviewed the letter.)

To Constable, the letter came out of nowhere. The ordinance itself is not new. He hadn’t heard any complaints from neighbors, and he’s kept the boat, which he named Might as Well and uses to fish “as often as I can,” for four years in his driveway.

“I thought, ‘This is ridiculous,’ and my first reaction was to leave a nasty, nasty message at the city hall,” he says. “And then I thought, well, I might as well build a screen … I’ll do what they want, but I’m not going to do it their way.”

So he started brainstorming. That’s when he had a chat with his neighbor, Hanif Panni, a muralist and graphic artist, about potentially painting the fence to look exactly like the space it was built to cover up. The two batted ideas back and forth over the fence that separated their yards. “We wanted to make an illusion,” says Panni.

Panni, whose artist name is <a href="https://www.hanifwondir.com/" target=_blank>Hanif Wondir</a>, was in. He had other projects on his docket, and wasn’t able to start painting the boat on the fence until early May. It took four days to complete. As he worked, people driving or walking by would stop to comment on the optical illusion, and a few neighbors told him that they, too, had received letters about the ordinance, says Panni.

The actual fence cost a few hundred bucks, per Constable, who did the labor himself. He paid Panni for painting the mural, too.

With Constable’s permission, Panni shared the finished work on social media. It quickly went viral.

“The more people see something, the more opinions there are about it … and it’s just so fun to see those branches stemming off of something that I created,” says Panni. “ … One of the reasons why I do public art, and art in general, is to inspire those conversations.”

The mural ultimately led to an approving phone call to Constable from Nick Borges, Seaside’s acting city manager, on Friday evening. Borges first saw the images of the painted fence when a friend sent them to him — neither of them knew the photos were taken in Seaside. “I thought, ‘wow, that’s pretty creative.’ I laughed at it, and then I started getting calls from local media,” says Borges.

After years of complaints that the city was too lax about code enforcement, Borges says Seaside hired someone to enforce its codes, hence the letters sent to residents. Constable’s case was closed out in November, when the fence (at that point, without the mural) was spotted, says Borges.

“We’re not taking any action,” he says. “The only action I’m going to take is a high five, and that’s it.”

This story has been updated with comment from Seaside’s acting city manager Nick Borges.

Regional Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting, 2021

Society of Professional Journalists' D.C. Dateline Awards Finalist for best series, 2022

Bates College, BA in English and Women and Gender Studies

Rachel Kurzius joined The Washington Post in 2022 as its inaugural reporter for The Home You Own.

Rachel Kurzius

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The city made him hide his boat — so he had it painted on his fence

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