“This is it! I have arrived,” she said.
A few weeks ago, the Sherrys and their three young children moved in to the just-built house. Within a day, the finished basement became a maze of play sets; the oversize mudroom, a getaway for her yellow lab, Trevi.
Sherry and her husband had been casually looking for a new home for several months, but she instantly fell in love with Willowsford, with its bright, functional interiors and unusual perks, like a working vegetable farm.
“Life is so busy nowadays, it’s nice to take a step back and be able to show our kids where their veggies are growing,” she said. “And there’s a lot of great, usable space in the house.”
Willowsford may have an unusual mix of offerings, but it epitomizes the work of developers attempting to woo post-recession buyers with hip amenities and more open, practical homes.
“In this tough period, the builders that are surviving are surviving because they’ve come up with some clever idea,” said David Crowe, chief economist with the National Association of Home Builders.
Brian Cullen, the head of development for Willowsford, was on the team that bought the 4,000-acre property in the fall of 2009. The team asked a local real estate advisory firm to help them determine the psychological profile of potential residents.
“Willowsford’s concept was born of its transitional location between quickly urbanizing eastern Loudoun County and rural, western Loudoun County,” Cullen said. He said he hopes the luxe amenities make up for the longer drive to downtown Washington. “Here, people aren’t compromising by moving out to Loudoun County. It’s, ‘I moved to Loudoun, and this is what I got.’ ”
Permits on the rise
After a long, brutal housing slump, developments are sprouting up again in Loudoun and other parts of the Washington area.
Overall, the D.C. area had the third most construction permits issued in 2011, after Houston and Dallas. There were 1,937 permits issued in the District and eight of the surrounding counties in the first three months of this year, according to Census Bureau figures, compared with 1,810 during the same period in 2010. It might not seem like much of a change, but considering that housing starts plummeted by 80 percent in many areas between 2006 and 2009, it’s enough to make builders optimistic.
“Northern Virginia is not anywhere close to where it was in 2005 or ’06, but in the latter parts of 2010, it picked up, and in ’12, we see a bit of an uptick,” said Michael Toalson of the Home Builders Association of Virginia.
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