If any good at all comes from the CV-19 emergency, it’s that families are reimagining how they want to live—paying less attention to where they work and more to where they want to be. You’ll see that effect today in a fast-selling custom home community near Parker that’s orienting its lifestyle around a historic farm instead of a pool or a golf course.
“Your nervous system just calms down,” says Braden McLoughlin, who is making a thousand-mile move from Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood to Fox Hill, south of Bayou Gulch Road on Flintwood Road, near Parker.
With a job as a trader that McLoughlin says is stressful, he and wife Vanessa have scoured Denver’s housing scene looking for laid-back surroundings. A Redfin search turned up Fox Hill—and a 4,911-square-foot contemporary walkout ranch that builder Nicholas Custom Homes already had under construction on a near-2-acre view site, set to finish next week.
Meanwhile, Fox Hill’s custom builders are starting five other homes in a new area of acre-plus sites with ponderosa pines and great views. But buyers are already well ahead of them—taking eight recent sales from $1.17 million, including two of those custom spec homes.
“We’re getting buyers from all over the country,” says Paige McLaughlin, a broker at Fox Hill, working from the century-old farmhouse that’s now an information center. Several of those buyers are opting for ‘multigenerational’ plans that work for kids coming home, or older parents moving in—becoming a specialty of Fox Hill’s builders. They all get 1-gig fiber optics for super-fast office communications.
Almost on cue, I met a second couple from Chicago, Holly, and Fritz Heffinger, looking to move here with their two kids, 5 and 7. They’d looked at Stapleton and up in Summit County, before discovering Fox Hill on web search for homes on acreage. Now they’re working with Paige, looking at one custom home she has ready for move-in (you can tour it Sunday, Oct. 11); along with the option of customizing a home underway, or building from scratch.
What they didn’t see until they arrived here was a high-tech greenhouse that’s producing fresh salad greens—part of the fresh produce residents receive, already including eggs, herbs, honey, tilapia, and hops for a neighborhood brew, as part of a farm-to-table lifestyle.
To keep up with demand, Fox Hill is inviting Ranch Living into its builder group, also including Camerata Homes, Gladstone Custom Homes and TM Grace Builders. To reach the farmhouse and to see the new plans those builders are starting now, take Flintwood south from Bayou Gulch a mile; watch for the turn east.
The news and editorial staffs of The Denver Post had no role in this post’s preparation.
