The Farmington Architectural Design Review Committee took its first formal look at the Enclave at the Farmington River master plan on Thursday, May 21, and after about two hours of going through three lots, one neighborhood at a time, sent the applicant back with a punch list and a deadline.
The verdict, as committee member Sheldon Crosby put it near the end of the meeting, was that the committee "appreciate their effort and think they're on the right track and keep going." The chair agreed. Then he asked the applicant to come back on a lot-by-lot basis — complete packages, no partial submissions — before the committee's next meeting on Thursday, June 18.
This was the meeting the April 27 TPZ vote put on the calendar. When the Town Plan and Zoning Commission accepted the formal application from National Land Holdings, LLC — an affiliate of Minneapolis-based Crown Equities, LLC — and scheduled the public hearing for July 13, the same regulation that triggered the public hearing also triggered an ADRC review. The committee's job between now and then is to compile written comments on architectural appropriateness and continuity and forward them to TPZ before the hearing.
The plan in front of the committee is 237 housing units across roughly 80 acres: 79 single-family homes on the river-side peninsula and 158 multifamily townhomes nearer Farmington Avenue, organized into three "lots" or neighborhoods, labeled A, B, and C — the same scheme committee members saw at the informal June 2025 TPZ review and at the ADRC's pre-application walk-through days later, now with more architectural detail.
Worth noting what Thursday's meeting does and does not mean. The ADRC does not approve the Enclave, cannot kill the Enclave, and did not take a vote. Attorney Robert J. Reeve of Scully, Nicksa & Reeve in Unionville opened by reading the assignment out loud: "We are here tonight on a referral from the TPZ under the midpoint development regulation. The regulation says that we are to give advice on the appropriateness and the architectural continuity of our master plan." Comments, not approvals. The substantive decisions happen on July 13. What Thursday night moved was the design conversation.
The road the town has wanted for ten years
Before the committee got to facades and garage doors, civil engineer Thomas Daly of SLR Consulting walked through the site plan, and one piece of it has been in the Farmington POCD for longer than the Enclave has been a project. The master plan terminates Bridgewater Road into a landscaped roundabout, runs a new public road through the middle of the development, ties it into the Central Way cul-de-sac the LDS Temple was required to build during its own application, and connects through to Melrose Drive. Traffic signals at both ends. The other roads inside the development would be private and HOA-maintained.
"This interconnection from Bridgewater and Melrose through Central Way has always been a top desire by the town," Daly said. "So that really formulated a lot of what we looked at."
The site plan also includes a 100-foot vegetated buffer to the Farmington River, a several-hundred-foot setback from the Connecticut Water wellhead, and an extension of the Farmington Heritage Trail that picks up from the JRF Management mixed-use project to the west — "the Launch," in the engineer's shorthand — loops around the peninsula, and meets Central Way. A small kayak ramp at the on-site pond would be for residents only.
The site itself is not in the FEMA floodplain. It sits in a town overlay zone with its own setback rules, and a pending federal floodplain remap — built on better topographic data than the older maps — would, if adopted, take more of the buildable area out of the regulated zone. Daly said he could not get a clear answer on when the federal map gets formally adopted.
Lot A: pair the garages
Lot A sits along Bridgewater Road, between the new public road and the existing Riverbend assisted-living facility. The applicant is targeting empty-nesters and presented two floorplan variants, with the dominant one carrying a first-floor master bedroom suite. Reeve told the committee the bulk of the units would be that single-level master configuration.
The committee's feedback on Lot A came down to three asks: pair the garages so the rendered streetscape has alternating doubles rather than a single line of garage faces; introduce sliding or French doors so first-floor master units can walk out to a small patio in back; and add parallel-parking bump-outs along the new public road for visitors, so the street feels like a street and not a row of driveways.
Lot B: bumps in, bumps out
Lot B is the bigger neighborhood — smaller-scale multifamily townhomes, presented as a rental product, organized around two amenity nodes: a clubhouse with a pool and a multi-use court at the center, and a smaller central green with a gazebo on the west side. The applicant turned a substantial number of units 90 degrees to keep only three curb cuts onto the new public road.
The Lot B feedback was the longest stretch of the meeting and the most architectural. Three elevation renderings drew most of it. The committee liked the chimneys, the window boxes, the balconies, and the Georgian iron detailing. They wanted more horizontal articulation. They wanted physical "bumps in and out" between brick and clapboard sections, not single-plane facades where two materials meet at a line. They wanted the awkward vertical stair-windows reworked. They asked the smooth panels between brick units to be presented as clapboard.
The bigger structural note came from committee member Miles Brown, who suggested the applicant stop varying every adjacent unit and instead group townhomes by block-level style — same architecture across a stretch, different architecture around the corner. "There's some really elegant neighborhoods… where everything's the same for a whole block," Brown said. "But you get to the end of the block and you go around the corner and everything's the same but different from that street… Create neighborhoods."
Brown also pushed for the Lot B streetscape to read more like a walkable plain community and less like a row of garage faces. "What good plan design is about is not about this suburban kind of parking," he said. "You want to make sense of community. See people walking."
Lot B has a structural problem the committee asked the applicant to solve through architecture rather than imported fill. The new public road would sit eight to ten feet above the rear-garage grade for some Lot B units. The applicant wants to handle that differential with split-level facades, stoops, and retaining walls between units rather than trucking in thousands of cubic yards of dirt. The committee asked for cross-sections at the next meeting showing how the high and low conditions read from both the road and the parking side.
Lot C: parameters, not portraits
Lot C is the 79 single-family detached homes on the peninsula formed by the river bend — the part of the site with the river views, the central green corridor, and the Heritage Trail loop. Reeve described them as custom, with each lot offering significant buyer flexibility.
This was the most contested architectural conversation of the night, and the only one where the committee and the applicant did not converge cleanly. The applicant wants maximum customization, including the possibility of contemporary homes sitting next to traditional ones. Several committee members were open to stylistic mixing. Several others were not.
What the committee asked for instead was a kit of parameters before the next meeting: typical plot plans showing one small lot and one large lot with dimensions, a maximum living-area figure, a maximum garage size — three-car as the cap, four-car flagged as out of place — and a maximum height. The committee did not impose a style; it asked for the dimensional envelope inside which 79 different houses will sit. The chair flagged that buildable area, setbacks, and lot-width parameters would be the structure to work within.
What's actually next
The applicant agreed to submit revised plans on a lot-by-lot basis before the June 18 ADRC meeting — complete packages, one lot at a time, no partial-lot submissions. After the June 18 review, the committee's written comments go to the TPZ in time for the July 13 public hearing.
Absent committee member Dave Quisenberry submitted written comments that the chair distributed as printed handouts during the meeting.
One more ADRC session; one TPZ hearing. The Mercury will be there.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road — the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. Whatever you keep there is preserved at institutional grade, which is roughly the standard the ADRC is asking Crown Equities to hit on the Enclave's townhome facades. We make no further promises about how brick meets clapboard at your unit, but the air itself is on the record. 📦 860.777.4001
— Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's Architectural Design Review Committee long enough to know that "appropriateness and architectural continuity" is two hours of work per lot, that the chair will accept revisions only as complete packages, and that the Mercury arrives, as ever, after the meeting has ended. He is on his second cup of coffee. The transcript was just shy of two hours. The drawings were not. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering — the zoning meeting that runs an hour-plus on a single lot, the police log that publishes before most of the country is awake, the school board vote that determines what your kids learn next year, the design review that quietly decides what the eastern end of Farmington Avenue is going to look like for the next forty years. We publish slowly, deliberately, and accurately. Always last to breaking news. Always thorough about everything else. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰