by Sean McManus
Staff Writer
In a short-sleeve tropical button-down shirt and khakis — the official uniform of the Ponte Vedra Beach businessman — Jay McGarvey edges his Land Rover up the incline and into the entrance to Sea Colony, the artistic new 115-acre luxury oceanfront development in St. Augustine Beach.
The guard at the gate warns that some construction vehicles have been going a little too fast in this pedestrian-friendly community and McGarvey amicably instructs him to tell the police it might be time to start handing out some “big fat tickets.”
McGarvey is CEO of McGarvey Residential Communities, the developer responsible for communities all over Jacksonville and the beaches, like Oceanwalk in Atlantic Beach and Lost Beach in Ponte Vedra Beach. He’s even built something called Sopris Mesa near Aspen, Colo. Most recently, he is responsible for waking up the sleepy town of St. Augustine Beach with the only two developments that could fit in this sandy cousin of the oldest city in America, Sea Colony and Anastasia Dunes to its northwest.
Practically every public agency you can think of had a say in the permitting process for Sea Colony, from the Department of Environmental Protection to the Army Corps of Engineers, to the St. Johns River Water Management District. It’s on a beautiful and environmentally sensitive tract of beachfront that consists partly of wetlands, and is the home to sea turtles and the endangered Anastasia beach mouse.
So as a host of interested buyers, from Arvida Reality (now St. Joe) to the State of Florida, couldn’t seem to make the whole package work, McGarvey went through the arduous and political permitting process. What resulted is a community that has what McGarvey calls a TND (traditional neighborhood design) with a de-emphasis on cars and promotes higher density on less land. The first thing McGarvey did was set aside a third of the land for conservation.
McGarvey sells individual lots and the owner controls the architecture and construction. But the lots are subject to a serious litany of environmental codes and design regulations, administered by a code committee that, in addition to the views, end up being the reason people want to live there in the first place.
“We have a strict light management plan and homes are pulled back off the beach,” said McGarvey. “All the windows have turtle glass that emits less light and the street lights shine downward and away from the beach for a glow effect.”
McGarvey also lowered the density from 346 units to 215 and the homes must be built in a style called Florida vernacular, or off-grade construction, where the homes are raised off the ground by about two feet to accommodate the dunes, as opposed to being built on a concrete slab. They encourage lots of porches and homes are required to have metal roofs; beams have to cover any exposed columns.
Other stylistic requirements are meant to create an urban feel within the context of a beach town. The lots are smaller and the houses are pulled closer to the street and built higher. Sea Colony has alleyways that function as extended driveways to encourage walking and garages are underground. The roads are narrow and are built to contain “traffic-calming devices.” All units are single-family detached, no duplexes.
The homes inside Sea Colony will run for anywhere from $750,000 to $2 million, but there is a quaint row of cottages, all in muted salmon and grays that will sell for about $350,000. There is a private beach club and four boardwalks, equally spaced along the development, to the beach. The beach club has educational exhibits telling homeowners all about things like the Anastasia beach mouse.
Around the tight corners of Sea Colony, down streets like Barefoot Trace and Ocean Palm and through the indigenous vegetation — muley grass, love grass, yaupon and other salt tolerant plants — that McGarvey requires of his landscapers, are the cottages. Designed by the Flores brothers of Kill Devil Hill, N.C., the alleys behind the cottages are made of oyster shells and coquina and are meant to remind buyers of the rustic Outer Banks. McGarvey said about a third of the people buying lots in Sea Colony are using the homes as their primary residences; for another third, it is their second home and the remaining buyers are looking for retirement homes.
Regardless of who is buying, Sea Colony is a big part of a major revitalization of quiet St. Augustine Beach. The town, which has its own mayor, Emmett Pacetti, only runs a few miles down A1A, and is what McGarvey, understandably, calls “a great little city to do business in.”
“St. Augustine Beach is like what Jacksonville Beach and Neptune Beach were 30 years ago,” he said. “There are still a lot of sand and dirt roads; it’s funky and eclectic and bohemian.” Streets here, he notes, are unpretentiously named after letters of the alphabet.
According to McGarvey, St. Augustine Beach has a “great proprietary feel. People attend town hall meetings, the building department is practical. They have guidelines, but they listen.
“And Mayor Pacetti did a great job in beefing up the local police and fire departments and was a major factor in the building of the new AIA,” said McGarvey, referring to the connecter about three miles west of St. Augustine Beach that made the whole area more accessible.
St. Augustine Beach is being discovered, and, according to McGarvey, a good economy and an increased amount of development to the north and south contributed to the major boom. Noticing that trend about three years ago, his company bought the Sea Colony property for $10 million and the 92-acre tract for Anastasia Dunes for almost $5 million.
Anastasia Dunes, down the beach on the west side of AIA, has the Flores-inspired North Carolina feel with a brick amenities center and is more moderately priced than Sea Colony. Near the entrance, McGarvey has a project in the works to build condominiums with another developer, North Florida Builders. The rest, 138 single-family homes, will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $500,000. Again, McGarvey is trying to preserve as much of the environment as possible and is leaving extensive canopy coverage and oak hammock intact. Anastasia Dunes will conform to a slightly less rigid architectural code than Sea Colony, but is still pretty strict. McGarvey said it reminds him of his Oceanwalk development in Atlantic Beach.
Oceanwalk was his first big project in Jacksonville. He moved here from Pittsburgh in 1973 to take a job in the commercial mortgage banking division of the Charter Company. Then he went to work for local mortgage broker John Sisk before going out on his own. Since then he has bought and sold properties all over Riverside and Avondale, developed Kensington on Atlantic Boulevard, nine developments in Ponte Vedra Beach, a development inside the World Golf Village and a smattering of smaller developments near Julington Creek in Mandarin, totaling about 23 communities in 19 years. Sopris Mesa, his development in Colorado, is 30 minutes outside of Aspen.
But his passion right now is St. Augustine Beach. McGarvey gave $40,000 to the City to renovate the old coquina City Hall building on the ocean and turn it into a community center. He also agreed to pay for half the landscaping at the south entrance of the city.
“The best part is giving back to the community,” said McGarvey. “I really want to preserve the human fabric of this place. It’s the kind of place that reminds a 50-something year-old like me of going to the beach as a kid.”
And that’s the primary challenge — preserving the desirable elements of the town in the wake of development that McGarvey is, in large part, responsible for.
He said that with tight planning controls and strict regulations about style and land use, it can be done, citing Lake Tahoe and Aspen as examples.
McGarvey wants to be a part of the comprehensive revitalization, to encourage a town center concept and already-existing attractions like the farmer’s market on the beach. He wants to encourage a sense of place.
“After all, there’s not a beach in Florida like this left,” he said. “I love it here.”