A local developer plans to build seven luxury townhomes with carriage houses at the end of East Liberty Street, a project that just cleared a major hurdle with Savannah’s Historic District Board of Review.
J. Corde Wilson of Beacon Builders was granted preliminary height and mass approval on Wednesday to build the three-story attached multi-family homes on a vacant lot on 544 E. Liberty Street.
“Getting height and mass was one of the big hurdles, and hopefully we’ll be breaking ground in the next six to eight weeks,” said Wilson.
In order to construct new buildings within the Historic Landmark District, developers, builders and architects must gain approval from the review board in two phases. The first involves height and mass, and the second phase looks at design details.
Wilson will return to the board again in January for the second phase.
With financing already in place, Wilson plans to build one unit at a time.
“We’ll just start the first unit on the corner in late January, and construction should take six to eight months,” said Wilson, adding that they should be ready to close by August 2014.
The townhomes, Wilson said, will be reminiscent of mid-19th century row houses, in a Savannah-gray brick with black ivy border. Each unit will include an 860-square-foot main house with a two-story, 553-square-foot carriage house behind it. The ground floor of the carriage house will provide parking for two cars. Prices for each parcel will start around $699,000.
At Wednesday’s meeting, the board outlined adjustments Wilson would need to make before returning in January. Some of the tweaks include removing fake shuttered windows on the west façade and increasing the height of some of the windows.
Board member Reed Engle suggested reconsidering the second-story porches and, instead, making them smaller balconies to fit in more with the surrounding homes.
Some members also praised Wilson, who first appeared before the review board in November, for scaling down his previous plans from four-story units to three. The neighborhood is comprised mostly of two and three-story dwellings.
Wilson’s company, Beacon Builders, bought the vacant property on the corner of Houston and Liberty streets in 2005, with plans to put in condominiums and retail space. The lot has had a few different uses over the years, from a lumberyard in 1888 to a one-story auto garage that closed in the ’90s.
“We had plans approved back in ’06 for a four-story condominium with some retail space and 42 condos and parking,” said Wilson. “For better or worse, we never broke ground. And in light of the economic downturn, it’s probably a good thing.”
His company held onto the land and when Wilson revisited the project, he decided townhomes made more sense. Financing for condominiums has become especially difficult since the housing market collapse five years ago, he said, and the old plans received negative feedback from the community when he originally proposed them.
Wilson still has a few other hurdles to cross with the East Liberty project, including getting approval from the city’s engineering department to subdivide the lot and a zoning variance to allow parking on the corner unit.
Beacon Builders designs and builds a variety of homes, specializing in greenfield, or rural, subdivisions around Chatham, Bryan and Effingham counties.