Ah, it seemed perfect.
A few paces from Hank Boyd’s new single-family house was a charming garden ornamenting the encircling homes. He invited his girlfriend to have a seat.
“I thought it was strange that he wanted us to sit in the garden, because it was freezing,” recounted Isabel Boyd.
Maybe it wasn’t the best location for a marriage proposal, particularly on a cold October day five years ago. So Hank Boyd ended up popping the question in the community’s clubhouse — the same place that later hosted the Boyd bridal shower, the Boyd wedding reception and the Boyds’ baby baptism reception.
The clubhouse and other public spaces have become special places for the Boyds and other residents of Maple Lawn.
That’s exactly what developer Greenebaum & Rose hoped would become of this place when the first residents moved into the planned community six years ago.
The plan was to create a place where residents have no reason to venture off the 604-acre premises to fill car tanks, mail packages, deposit checks or catch a happy hour with friends. All of that is available within a 15-minute walk down the main road that connects the 546 townhouses, condominiums and single-family houses to the business district and the Harris Teeter that arrived two years ago.
The Howard County development is nestled halfway between Baltimore and the District, a selling point for many of the residents. For Darryl and Stephanie Hollingsworth, it meant relief from the one-hour work commute from their previous home in Randallstown, Md.
“The location was the biggest attraction for us,” said Darryl, a systems engineer. It cut his drive to Columbia to 10 minutes and his wife’s Silver Spring commute to 20 minutes. Though Stephanie, a data analytics medical professional, recently accepted a new job at George Washington University Hospital that lengthened her commute, she, like many other workers in Maple Lawn, takes advantage of an express bus that ferries her into the District.
There is also a county bus that takes children a mile away to the cul de sac that houses the elementary, middle and high schools.
But convenience is not Maple Lawn’s most notable feature.
Perhaps it’s simply that “this place just pops up out of nowhere,” said Shawn Conyers, a tennis coach with clients in Maple Lawn.
Drive along Route 29 — or any of the major arteries that connect to Maple Lawn, such as routes 32 and 216 or Interstate 95 — and it’s hard to believe that just beyond the stretch of traffic circles lies a new mixed-used community.
The architecture of the units varies in style but draws mostly from late-19th- and early-20th-century town planning. The streets are narrow, and the garages are behind the houses. There are elevators in some of the townhouses and condos. The landscaping is groomed and symmetrical, with 20,000 trees to be planted by the end of development in 2017.
For Carrie O’Connell, who moved to Maple Lawn from Chicago four years ago, the community’s look was enough for her to want to start the paperwork. “When I turned the corner into this place with my Realtor, I told her, ‘I don’t care what you get me, just get me something in this place,” said O’Connell, sitting on a stoop chatting with a neighbor after a workout.
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