NORTHERN CALIFORNIA.- Thomas Kinkade is one of the most successful artists in the world. He is America’s most collected living painter, known to his admirers as "the Master of Light". His work hangs in one out of every 20 American homes. More than 350 galleries in the US are dedicated entirely to his work. And now he has created a housing development based on the idyllic fantasy world of his art. It is about a 40-minute drive east from San Francisco to the gated entrance to The Village, as the new development on the edge of Vallejo is known. It is the state’s first "themed" development and it is aimed at people who admire Kinkade’s art or who just want to live in the simple world his paintings portray. "It’s absolute heaven," says Jake Souza, a teacher who moved into the first of The Village’s houses in March and who lives there with her husband and two children. "It’s so peaceful. You see deer and rabbits from the window. Our friends call it Disneyland." And in a way it is, with its white picket fences and its flowerbeds of geraniums and petunias and its gazebo and its rustic street names - Stepping Stone Court and Rose Arbor Way. For Kinkade has created a brand that has touched a nerve in millions of his fellow citizens: a desire for a gentler world where old men sit by village greens.

Kinkade may be mocked by art critics and his work dismissed as "starter art" but he believes that God has given him a talent that can help to transform people’s lives. He was born 54 years ago in Sacramento, California. He had an early interest in art and, after leaving school, went first to the University of California at Berkeley and then to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. His first major job was as an illustrator working for the animator Ralph Bakshi on the 1982 film Fire and Ice. But already Kinkade believed that he had a special talent that would enable him to make his living by painting. He had great confidence in his own abilities: while still a young man he produced, with a college friend, James Gumey, an instructional book called The Artist’s Guide to Sketching.

In 1989 he formed Lightpost Publishing to promote and sell his work; since then the paintings and myriad spin-offs - jigsaws, wallpaper, greeting cards - have been rolling off the production line. His company, Media Arts Group, which saw revenues grow from $47m in 1997 to $138m in 2000, employs more than 450 people in its corporate headquarters and production facility in Morgan Hill, California. That production facility is important because Kinkade does not sell originals. The artworks are produced factory-style: he creates around a dozen new images a year, which are then digitally photographed and transferred on to a surface that is in turn attached to a canvas. Then "highlight artists", as they are called, mainly Latinos and Asians paid by the hour, add dashes of color that give the paintings their special look. He keeps his originals locked in a vault. His heroes are Norman Rockwell, who also created a magical idealistic world, and Andy Warhol, who also created his own art brand and was as famous for his image as for his art.

Perhaps the logical extension to providing work for people to hang on the walls of their homes was to create the very homes for the works to hang in - life imitating art that imitated life. So this spring, "The Village, a Thomas Kinkade Community" was launched by the developers Taylor Woodrow, with Kinkade himself cutting the ribbon and describing the 101 homes, some of which are still to be built, as "an environment where families can thrive". The "cottage-style" homes have been designed by the architect William Hezmalhalch with the instruction from Kinkade that they should exude "calm, not chaos, peace not pressure", a world of "simpler times". There are period lampposts, a fountain, and the four different types of house are named after Kinkade’s four girls, all of whom were introduced to the crowd of would-be purchasers on the first open day this spring. "This is a dream come true," said Kinkade at the opening. "We have believed for many years that the attachment people feel to the paintings could be embodied in a real place." 48 of the 101 proposed houses, priced from $376,000 to $419,000, have already been sold and they hope to have disposed of them all within a year.