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 group in Pickens County has 30 chickens generating all-around two dozen eggs a working day, and inhabitants included in the neighborhood’s agricultural attempts consider turns feeding the flock and accumulating the eggs for sale. Individuals volunteers involve Anthony, developer of this organic enclave on the South Saluda River 15 miles from downtown Greenville.

“It’s good. I get to go in there and converse to the females, and inform them I appreciate it,” Anthony said. “The group sells its eggs to the citizens, so it’s not like we’re actually preserving any revenue. But you are acquiring a superior product or service.”

A far better product, from a way of life standpoint, was what Anthony was on the lookout for when he started the Riverstead task in 2017, carving out 53 homesites on generous loads ranging from 2.8 to 5 acres, with sights ranging from the Saluda River to the Blue Ridge Mountains. His eyesight, which alternatively of a golfing class and tennis courts would have orchards and vineyards, started to come jointly correct as the pandemic hit—leaving numerous people to eschew big towns for areas where by they could have additional land, extra space, and a better excellent of existence.

“I had a a few-year sellout plan for Riverstead,” Anthony claimed, “and we offered it out in like 13 months. The pandemic rattled everyone, and it built people rethink their lives and what is vital. Being outdoors, remaining in nature, obtaining your hands soiled and getting your possess food source was one thing folks have been seeking for.”

37 households, 75 blueberry bushes

These days, residences have been constructed on 37 web pages in Riverstead, where some of the remaining tons have resold for 30 p.c extra than the primary customers purchased them for. The local community is utilizing 7 of its 15 acres of designated farmland, which is making “more than we can try to eat,” Anthony explained. Riverstead farm manager Phill Mathis, of the Greenville nonprofit Mill Village Farm, sells the relaxation to community places to eat.

Elsewhere, “we almost certainly have 75 blueberry bushes planted in 3 various patches that we’re having prepared to harvest,” Anthony stated. “We also have in all probability 60 Muscadine vines that produce each individual September, so we we’ll choose individuals. But what I’ve truly relished is looking at the community kind of choose what we started to the subsequent degree. There are wildflowers in all places. A single of the residents just received milkweed seeds, and they are planting them for butterflies. I signify, you identify it. Individuals are just expanding what we are accomplishing.”

In the Greenville location, Anthony’s past identify is synonymous with genuine estate development—his father Jim constructed The Cliffs, a string of mountain and lake golf communities dotting the Upstate, and currently owned by South Road Companions. Lucas, however, didn’t want to acquire an additional golf system neighborhood. He wanted to create some thing very similar to a group he identified though touring in South The usa, where residents bartered items and lived off the land. That trip presented the inspiration for Riverstead, which grew to become 1 of a handful of identical agricultural communities identified in the Southeast.

“I try to remember coming again on an airplane, and opening up just one of these in-flight journals and viewing an advert for one more golf training course advancement,” Anthony claimed. “I advised my spouse, you know what somebody needs to do? Anyone desires to start off a farm-based mostly group. And I got back again and started doing some study.”

Now, not only is Riverstead a reality, it’s also offered out. And with two-thirds of the residence safeguarded underneath a conservation easement, there is minor probability of growth. So Anthony is now at get the job done on his following outside-the-box challenge, a tiny farther south on the Saluda River.

Welcome to Heritage Bend

The house that will become Heritage Bend has a great deal in typical with Riverstead. Made to sit on a sleek curve of the Saluda near Powdersville, the web page will includes environmentally friendly spaces, picnic parts, trails and gardens, along with a handful of homesites—which Anthony reported will be substantial adequate so many generations of people can make households around just one a different.

Anthony is also included in Transcend Custom Properties, a company that builds modern day, 3-bed room residences involving 1,200 and 1,900 square ft that have “everything a family needs, but no wasted place,” he reported. “The bedrooms for kids are not enormous, but we never really want the youngsters expending time in their bedrooms, anyway.” Likewise, he’s concerned in a challenge identified as McKinney Creek that aims to establish cottages inland of Lake Keowee—with a shared pavilion on the lake, giving residents waterfront entry without the need of the exorbitant expense.

“I assume if we want a lot more people today to obtain Lake Keowee,” Anthony claimed, “then we’re likely to have to appear additional at this principle of living off the lake but developing a frequent area down by the drinking water wherever people can utilize it.”

From Riverstead and Heritage Bend to Transcend Custom Residences and McKinney Creek, Anthony’s job all have a comparable theme—one that encourages inhabitants to get exterior and just take gain of the organic environment, whether or not that be Lake Keowee, the Saluda River, a Muscadine vineyard, or the foothills north of Easley, exactly where he’s encouraging his father Jim with a new growth called Longview Carolina.

“We like to help each individual other on jobs. But he and I, we really don’t want to contact pictures over the exact thing,” Lucas explained. “So he handles specific factors, and I do sure aspects. We the two have distinct talents and talents. So I’m supporting him on that, and he has a couple of matters he’s functioning on. He’s busier than I am.”