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Sunday, May 2, 2004

Parade of Homes Preview

From the Tallahassee Democrat

The Tallahassee Builders Association's 2004 Parade of Homes will feature entries from 28 member builders ranging in price from Wilcox Construction's $2 million Mediterranean-style villa in Moore Pond down to BrackenChase's $121,000 condominium in Camellia Gardens. More typical of the Parade's middle ground, there's K2 UrbanCorps's New Urbanism retro cottage in Lake Genevieve Place, just off Park Avenue East and priced at $215,000.

….Dave Wamsley, president of K2 Urbancorp, said that his company is enjoying similar success. "We're really getting a good response from the customer market we're focused on," said Wamsley, a Florida State University graduate who has returned after several years in San Francisco with the intent, as he put it, "to turn back the clock without turning off modern conveniences."

A champion of so-called New Urbanism homebuilding, Wamsley has traveled extensively to study examples such as Florida's Seaside and Rosemary Beach of an architectural movement aimed at recapturing the neighborly ambiance of a century and more ago. "Genevieve Place is our first attempt to bring some of the architecture and key elements of doing a more historically accurate community in modern times," Wamsley said. "In building our first product line- 1920s-style cottages and bungalows- we're trying to capture in a new community what people find in Tallahassee's midtown neighborhoods like Lafayette Park and Beard Street."

Similar neighborhoods can be found in just about any great city or town around America, Wamsley said, citing Virginia Highlands in Atlanta, where retro homes have become one of the most sought-after real-estate products in neighborhoods. In Genevieve Place, he's planning to build 16 such homes with six already under contract. His two-story Parade entry, with the traditional features both inside and out of a Craftsman-style bungalow, will include three bedrooms, two baths, 9-foot ceilings and 1,600 square feet of living space.

Along with a wood burning fireplace and oak floors, it will also offer the modern conveniences of an upscale stainless-steel appliance package and custom built-ins including an entertainment center and wine bar.

"The yard itself will have a fairly elaborate kind of cottage-garden feel," Wamsley said. "We're heavily into landscaping. And every one of our houses will have a large front porch for that sense of community you'd have found back at the turn of the last century. Our goal is to mix in the old-style feeling with some of the more modern items such as the stainless-steel appliances.

Distinctively dated features include lots of built-in nooks and crannies, old-style trim, picture-mold crown and retro-looking architectural details such as pedestal sinks and vintage-inspired hardware and lighting.

"Our goal is to make people ask whether this is an older house that someone renovated, or is it a new home," Wamsley said. "The way we view the Parade, it's a great opportunity to put our first product out into the Tallahassee market and really get a response from the customer market we're focused on. Tallahassee is still a small enough market that it's ripe for new designs and new products."