What’s next for Riverstead developer? More ideas designed to connect residents with nature. | Greenville Real Estate Special Coverage

If it is Friday, then it’s time for Lucas Anthony to feed the chickens. The Riverstead local community in Pickens County has 30 chickens creating all-around two dozen eggs a day, and residents concerned in the neighborhood’s agricultural initiatives consider turns feeding the flock and gathering the eggs for sale. People volunteers involve Anthony, developer of this purely natural enclave on the South Saluda River 15 miles from downtown Greenville.

“It’s pleasant. I get to go in there and speak to the women, and convey to them I value it,” Anthony stated. “The neighborhood sells its eggs to the inhabitants, so it’s not like we’re really conserving any funds. But you are having a improved solution.”

A superior products, from a life-style standpoint, was what Anthony was seeking for when he began the Riverstead task in 2017, carving out 53 homesites on generous plenty ranging from 2.8 to 5 acres, with views ranging from the Saluda River to the Blue Ridge Mountains. His eyesight, which as an alternative of a golfing study course and tennis courts would have orchards and vineyards, began to come with each other suitable as the pandemic hit—leaving many individuals to eschew major cities for destinations exactly where they could have extra land, extra space, and a better quality of everyday living.

“I had a three-calendar year sellout prepare for Riverstead,” Anthony explained, “and we offered it out in like 13 months. The pandemic rattled most people, and it built men and women rethink their life and what’s important. Being outdoor, getting in character, getting your palms filthy and owning your very own foods resource was some thing persons have been wanting for.”

37 properties, 75 blueberry bushes

Right now, houses have been built on 37 web sites in Riverstead, the place some of the remaining a lot have resold for 30 p.c much more than the initial buyers bought them for. The neighborhood is using seven of its 15 acres of designated farmland, which is making “more than we can eat,” Anthony reported. Riverstead farm manager Phill Mathis, of the Greenville nonprofit Mill Village Farm, sells the rest to nearby dining places.

In other places, “we almost certainly have 75 blueberry bushes planted in 3 distinctive patches that we’re receiving completely ready to harvest,” Anthony stated. “We also have in all probability 60 Muscadine vines that generate each and every September, so we we’ll select those people. But what I’ve seriously appreciated is watching the neighborhood type of choose what we began to the following degree. There are wildflowers just about everywhere. A person of the residents just received milkweed seeds, and they are planting them for butterflies. I mean, you identify it. Folks are just expanding what we’re performing.”

In the Greenville region, Anthony’s previous title is synonymous with serious estate development—his father Jim built The Cliffs, a string of mountain and lake golf communities dotting the Upstate, and now owned by South Road Partners. Lucas, however, didn’t want to create a different golfing system neighborhood. He needed to create one thing equivalent to a neighborhood he observed even though traveling in South America, exactly where people bartered merchandise and lived off the land. That journey supplied the inspiration for Riverstead, which turned one particular of a handful of similar agricultural communities found in the Southeast.

“I keep in mind coming back again on an plane, and opening up one of these in-flight publications and looking at an advertisement for an additional golf program development,” Anthony said. “I instructed my wife, you know what anyone demands to do? Any individual requirements to begin a farm-dependent neighborhood. And I bought back and begun undertaking some investigation.”

Now, not only is Riverstead a reality, it is also sold out. And with two-thirds of the assets guarded underneath a conservation easement, there’s minimal likelihood of growth. So Anthony is presently at work on his following exterior-the-box challenge, a little farther south on the Saluda River.

Welcome to Heritage Bend

The house that will become Heritage Bend has a lot in popular with Riverstead. Designed to sit on a graceful curve of the Saluda in the vicinity of Powdersville, the website will features eco-friendly areas, picnic places, trails and gardens, along with a handful of homesites—which Anthony reported will be substantial ample so a number of generations of family members can build homes near one a different.

Anthony is also included in Transcend Customized Households, a firm that builds fashionable, a few-bedroom residences among 1,200 and 1,900 square feet that have “everything a spouse and children demands, but no wasted space,” he explained. “The bedrooms for kids aren’t enormous, but we do not truly want the children shelling out time in their bedrooms, anyway.” In the same way, he’s included in a job known as McKinney Creek that aims to build cottages inland of Lake Keowee—with a shared pavilion on the lake, giving citizens waterfront entry devoid of the exorbitant price.

“I imagine if we want a lot more folks to access Lake Keowee,” Anthony stated, “then we’re going to have to seem extra at this strategy of residing off the lake but developing a common area down by the drinking water where by men and women can use it.”

From Riverstead and Heritage Bend to Transcend Custom made Properties and McKinney Creek, Anthony’s task all have a identical theme—one that encourages people to get outdoors and just take gain of the normal environment, no matter if that be Lake Keowee, the Saluda River, a Muscadine vineyard, or the foothills north of Easley, where he’s encouraging his father Jim with a new development identified as Longview Carolina.

“We like to support every single other on jobs. But he and I, we never want to call pictures around the same detail,” Lucas claimed. “So he handles specific features, and I do certain factors. We both have various talents and talents. So I’m assisting him on that, and he has a pair of points he’s operating on. He’s busier than I am.”