05 Apr Hopkinton's Legacy Farms Aims for Fall 2012
http://hopkinton.patch.com/articles/hopkintons-legacy-farms-aims-for-fall-2012
By Gene Cassidy | Email the author | April 5, 2011
With 3 Planning Board meetings left before town elections
possibly change the makeup of decision-makers for Part 1 of Hopkinton’s signature project, developers say ‘Yeah, we’ve got that.’
Members of Hopkinton’s Legacy Farms development team expect to have approval from the town for Southwest Village, the first phase of the 940-unit, smart-growth development before Hopkinton’s May 16 elections.
“There’s nothing I’ve heard here tonight that makes me think we can’t get this done by then,” Steven Zieff, part of the Baystone Development team, told a joint meeting of the Hopkinton Planning Board and Hopkinton Conservation Commission Monday night, April 4.
If the approvals come through, people would start moving into apartments at Legacy Farms in fall 2012.
Southwest Village’s 240 apartments, clubhouse and pool would be finished by spring 2013, representatives for Legacy Farms said last night.
Legacy Farms’ low-impact plan will concentrate still-to-come retail and single-family-house plans on small portions of the site.
Legacy Farms smart-growth concept has won multiple design awards and met the approval of town officials and residents who want the 700 acres of former plant and shrub nurseries, ponds, forest and trails to remain as natural as it can. Seventy percent of the site will be open space, developers say.
A representative from Cube 3 architects showed photos of the types of houses Legacy developers had considered when looking for appropriate styles to fit the Hopkinton landscape.
Many of them had the woodsy color and shape of tasteful ski houses in Vermont, New Hampshire or Maine. Cube 3’s job, particularly with the multi-unit apartments in Southwest Village, is to render that style in larger buildings.
Cube 3’s Brian O’Connor explained that color, texture and broken roof lines will prevent the large complex from dwarfing the scale of nearby homes on Curtis Road.
A representative for land engineers Vanasse Hangen Brustlin said the site would be planted with native trees including red oaks, red maples and Ash. The tumbledown stone walls on the site would be creatively re-used, he said.
In one corner, the village slightly encroaches on a wetlands buffer. A groundwater specialist from wastewater consultants Tata & Howard said it is the best way to preserve key landscape features, especially nearby woods and a knoll that relieves the level landscape.
The complex will have a large, centrally located trash compactor, which will require some tenants to wheel or drive their trash across the parking lot. Several on the development team said this was preferable to a screened Dumpster near each building.
The finished village will be lit by LED lights which offer a concentrated beam with little diffusion. The technology is new enough that there was a bit of back-and-forth between developers and board members about light levels. According to the VHB spokesman, LED lights will not intrude on apartment residents or neighbors.
There is also little storage space built into the complex for what Planning Board member Claire Wright called people’s “inevitable accumulation of stuff.”
As the presentation started, Planning Board Chairman Joe Markey congratulated Zieff and by extension lead developer Roy MacDowell Jr., who watched from the back of the meeting room.
“This is consistent with what your conception has been over the last few years,” Markey said.