Our Town
When 100,000 delegates to the National Association of Home Builders convention drop in on Orlando Jan. 13-16, one of the star attractions will be a state-of-the-art home in Baldwin Park, a traditional neighborhood development near downtown Orlando.
Designed by the Orlando office of Bloodgood Sharp Buster Architects and Planners and built by Goehring and Morgan Construction, this year's "New American Home" is a two-story, Mediterranean-style stunner with 5,950 square feet of living area.
According to NAHB, the New American Home project offers visiting builders a "real-world laboratory" on using leading-edge designs, materials and construction techniques.
The four-bedroom Baldwin Park entry is built around a spectacular "courtyard oasis" and swimming pool. Almost every room offers views of the lushly landscaped getaway area.
"The vision behind the home was to build a courtyard home that felt as if it had grown organically as the family grew. From the front it looks fairly unpretentious, but once inside it just gets larger and larger," says Kim Goehring, president of Goehring and Morgan. "Plus everything new you can think of on the market is in there."
After its stint in the spotlight in January, the home will be open to the public and then sold. Goerhring expects it to be priced at $2 million-plus.
(From Randy 9/20: Main feature sidebar to go near Altamonte Springs city profile.)
ALTAMONTE'S NEW DOWNTOWN
Ground was broken in August for the Altamonte Town Center, an ambitious, $200 million-plus project set on a 25-acre site between I-4 and the Altamonte Mall.
The town center, a partnership between the city's Community Redevelopment Agency and private developers, will boast an impressive 1.5 million square feet for retail space, offices and residences. But more importantly, it will finally give the sprawling Seminole County city a distinctive urban core.
To be sure, planners are making the most of a relatively compact space. By contrast, bustling Winter Park Village, located along U.S. Hwy. 17-92, encompasses buildings totaling just 500,000 square feet on 40 acres.
"We'll have three times the amount of space on just 60 percent of the acreage. We're talking about a very dense and very highly planned project," says Mark Sneed, project director for Altamonte Town Center. "But it's a very different type of project."
Compared to Winter Park Village, the Altamonte Town Center will have less retail, since shopping opportunities already exist in the adjacent 1.3 million-square-foot regional mall. Instead, plans call for as many as 460 apartments and condominiums, with the possibility of an upscale hotel.
A number of developers are also planning condominium projects on land near the town center. Epoch Properties plans to build two towers, of five and seven stories, containing 320 high-end apartments. Another tower will contain 136 condominiums.
The northwest portion of the project will be anchored by Crane's Roost Plaza, where concerts and other public events are already held on the shores of Crane's Roost Lake.
"The town center is going to have a remarkable impact on the city of Altamonte Springs. It's really the next step in the evolution of the community," says Frank Martz, director of the city's community redevelopment agency and planning services. "It'll bring people to the town center every day of the year. It'll be a wonderful balance of living, working and playing."
POLK COUNTY: THE LAST FRONTIER
Loughman, a tiny crossroads located in northeastern Polk County, boasts a post office, general store, firehouse and a couple of gas stations. But the unincorporated community, population 1,380, will soon be transformed by an upscale golf course development that will ultimately contain 4,800 homes and 300,000 square feet of retail space.
The project, spearheaded by ABD Development, is called Providence. And if Loughman seems an unlikely place for such an ambitious undertaking, then you haven't been following Central Florida development trends over the past few years.
Growth has moved north and west for years, stretching the boundaries of what had been considered acceptable commuting distance from Orlando. Now developers and buyers are discovering that previously anonymous Polk County to the south offers plenty of developable land located no further from Orlando proper than subdivisions in more established locations.
Evidence is the popularity of the so-called Four Corners area, where Orange, Lake, Osceola and Polk counties meet.
Four Corners has boomed in recent years, although the area suffers from something of an identity crisis because portions of it are governed by so many different entities. The area encompasses four school districts, seven zip codes, three area codes, three water management districts, two regional planning councils and multitudes of service providers.
Providence, however, will be the first development of its kind to fully embrace its Polk County roots, thus making this land of small towns and citrus groves as much a part of metro Orlando as Lake and Volusia counties have become over the past decade.
Construction on homes at Providence, located at U.S. Hwy. 17-92 and C.R. 54, will begin early next year. A groundbreaking ceremony was held in June, attended by participating builders such as U.S. Home, Lennar, Inland Homes and Greater Construction, all companies that have found success in pioneering new territory.
The 2,000-acre project will feature a Michael Dasher-designed golf course and a signature clubhouse designed by Don Evans of The Evans Group. The first phase will include 1,950 single-family homes and townhomes with prices ranging from the $180s to more than $500,000.
More than 2,800 homes are planned for the second phase, although about half of the Providence site will be set aside for parks, open space and conservation areas, according to ABD President David Kohn.
Polk County, formed in 1860 and named in honor of President James K. Polk, has in the past depended largely upon phosphate mining and agriculture for its economic well-being. The world's largest phosphate deposits are located here, and mining continues on about 200,000 acres.
The county has the most farmland in Florida, with 621,489 acres under cultivation. Tourists also appreciate Polk County's relatively close proximity to Walt Disney World and other Central Florida attractions.
AIRPORT AREA READY FOR TAKEOFF
Downtown Orlando's growth gets most of the press, but the unincorporated areas southeast of the city are quietly posting staggering numbers bolstered by huge master-planned developments.
In April, Orlando annexed 1,573 acres between S.R. 417, the Central Florida GreeneWay and S.R. 528, also known as the Beeline Expressway. The undeveloped tract, near Orlando International Airport, is being prepped for a mixed-use development called Vista Park. Developer Rob Yeager says Vista Park will ultimately contain 4,000 homes as well as retail and commercial space.
The city has annexed more than 12,000 eastside acres since 1996, and with good reason. Planners say the sparsely populated region surrounding the airport will mushroom to around 50,000 residents by 2030.
Yeager is also seeking to develop a shopping center south of the Beeline and north of Narcoossee Road. The 536-acre project would contain a pedestrian-friendly retail center along with a 300-room hotel and at least 9,000 multi-family residential units.
Large communities already thriving on the eastside include Terrabrook's Vista Lakes, a 948-acre, master-planned development encompassing miles of walking, jogging and biking trails as well as large lakes offering fishing, swimming and canoeing.
Vista Lakes offers a Resident's Club complete with junior Olympic swimming pool and a kiddie pool with an elephant spray fountain and pirate's shipwreck. The Village Town Center will include a supermarket, a variety of restaurants and other retail outlets as well as townhomes.
Avalon Park, an 1,800-acre neotraditional development with a bustling town center, is also booming, according to developer Beat Kahli, president and CEO of Avalon Associates. Kahli, who hails from Switzerland, recently told a gathering of local real estate professionals that he was initially skeptical about Avalon Park because the site seemed remote when he first viewed it in the 1990s.
But time changes everything. "The project is running far ahead of expectations," Kahli says. "The vision that we had, where people can live, learn and work in a community, is already established. In the next several years, we'll just become bigger."
THE NOT-SO-WILD WEST
Geographically, Volusia County sits 50 miles northeast of Orlando, between the St. Johns River and the Atlantic Ocean. But these days, in a region where growth is pushing outward in all four directions, geography doesn't mean as much as it once did.
Today, the western portion of the county once identified almost exclusively with Daytona Beach is emerging as a suburb of Orlando. Living in Deltona, DeLand or Orange City is considered no more out of the mainstream than living in Altamonte Springs, Longwood or Lake Mary seemed to be 25 years ago.
With nearly 70,000 residents, Deltona has long since surpassed Daytona Beach as the largest municipality in Volusia County. It has seen a 343 percent growth rate since 1980 and adds roughly 1,100 new homes each year.
DeLand, the county seat, is a college community-Stetson University has been there for more than a century-with a lovely shopping district. Once placid Orange City is western Volusia's commercial epicenter, thanks to easy I-4 access.
Indeed, as metro Orlando spreads north and east along I-4 through Seminole County, western Volusia is directly in growth's path.
Much of the activity is spurred by commercial development along the so-called High Tech Corridor, which runs the length of I-4 between Tampa and Daytona Beach. Projections call for the stretch of interstate between Lake Mary and Sanford, just east of the Volusia/Seminole border, to eventually contain more than 13 million square feet of office space.
To accommodate growth already occurring and growth soon to come, the state has recently fixed one of the region's most annoying traffic bottlenecks by widening the St. Johns River Bridge near where the two counties converge.
In addition to convenience, buyers are also lured to western Volusia for the laid-back charm of its small towns, the abundance of lakes and proximity to the beach.
THE CALADIUM KING
When Gotha-based horticulturist Henry Nehrling saw his first caladium in 1893, at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, it was love at first sight.
"I saw for the first time in my life masses of fancy leafed caladiums," he wrote. "When I admired the richness, brilliancy and delicacy of these often-translucent colors, I was reminded of art-not of nature. In this, as in many other cases, nature simply surpasses art."
When Nehrling planted caladiums at his Gotha estate, dubbed Palm Cottage Gardens, he began with 50 plants. Soon he began to receive other varieties from friends and fellow enthusiasts throughout the United States and South America, where caladiums were grown in abundance.
By 1916, Nehrling had some 75,000 caladiums from which he created more than 2,000 hybrids. He began to sell the plants, which thrived in the Florida heat, and almost single-handedly made the caladium a staple of Florida gardens.
Nehrling, who had been a curator at the Milwaukee Public Museum before moving to Gotha in 1886, was also renowned for his work in ornithology. His book Native Birds of Song was praised by scholars as being comparable in detail and description to the work of John James Audubon.
A 1917 freeze destroyed Nehrling's caladiums and other tropical plants. He then moved to the southwest Florida city of Naples, below the freeze line, where he rebuilt his horticulture business and struck up a friendship with Thomas Edison.
After falling victim to bad investments, Nehrling returned to Gotha where he died in 1929 at the age of 78. But his legacy lives on in the colorful, heart-shaped plants that he championed.
THE MILLION-DOLLAR MARKET
Not long ago, the sale of a $1 million home was considered to be a big deal in Central Florida real estate circles. Nowadays, a seven-figure sale is notable but not particularly surprising.
According to statistics compiled by Fannie Hillman and Associates, a Winter Park-based real estate company, the sale of $1 million homes in Orange and Seminole counties was up 131 percent this year over the same time frame last year.
During the first six months of 2004, according to the biannual Hillman Report, there were 120 sales of both new and resale homes valued at $1 million or more. That's just 15 shy of the entire 2003 total. And the average sale price of seven-figure transactions was $1.62 million, up 5 percent over last year's average.
Lakefront homes in the 32789 zip code, which encompasses much of Winter Park, fetched an average sale price of more than $2.3 million. That's the highest in the area and an increase of an astonishing 84 percent over last year.
However, the average price per square foot remained the same, at $391. That means more buyers are opting for additional square footage, and are building on as much of their valuable lakefront property as local regulations will allow.
In addition to 32789, the zip codes surveyed by the Hillman Report included 32792, 32751, 32804, 32803, 32806 and 32801. The average sale price for all non-lakefront homes sold in those zip codes was $256,644, up more than 30 percent from last year. However, the average sale price of all lakefront homes in those zip codes actually declined 9 percent, to $588,380.