The applicant came back to the Architectural Design Review Committee on June 16 with a revised master plan and one clear request: a recommendation. After a second night of walking the riverfront development lot by lot, the committee gave its direction. What it did not give, and cannot give, is a vote.
"There is no vote per se," town planner Shannon Rutherford told the room near the end of the special meeting. The committee's comments from this meeting and from its first review in May will be formalized into the minutes and sent to the Town Plan and Zoning Commission as a recommendation. One member put the committee's role more plainly: "We're advisory only. They vote on it."
That distinction is the whole story of the Enclave at the Farmington River, a roughly 80-acre, 237-unit development proposed by National Land Holdings, LLC, the Minneapolis-based Crown Equities affiliate, on land south of Bridgewater Road running down to the river. The committee that has spent two evenings shaping how the project will look has no authority to approve or reject it, a division of land-use authority that runs through nearly every major Farmington development. The body that does, TPZ, accepted the application in April and takes it up at a public hearing on July 13.
What changed since May
The applicant team, led by attorney Robert Reed of Scully, Nicksa and Reeve and Crown Equities co-founder Jack Brandt, returned with the central revision the committee had asked for in May: the road through the middle of the single-family section is gone, replaced by a green corridor of roughly 1.3 acres running toward the river. "We think that's a great site line," Brandt said, "and that will provide green space and privacy and so forth for homes in that area as well."
The revised plan added parallel parking along the connector road and Bridgewater, a perimeter walking trail with three access points, and a frontage sidewalk along the development's main road. The committee asked the project's engineer, SLR, to add one more trail access point in the corner of the green and to find spots for benches and river views along the way. "Anywhere where we can put a bench or two," one member said, "people are going to be walking around this entire complex."
The committee got specific. Very specific.
Most of the three-hour meeting was not about whether the Enclave should be built. It was about brick.
The development splits into three sections. Lot A and Lot B are townhomes, 158 units in total, nearer Farmington Avenue. Lot C is 79 single-family homes on the peninsula along the river. For the townhomes, the committee landed on a rule: brick in the center units, clapboard on the ends, with a stepped jog in the facade so no building reads as a single flat wall. Where a building is brick, the brick wraps all four sides rather than stopping at the corner. "If you're going to do a brick building, then you have to do a brick building," one member said.
The committee asked for the dormers to be flipped to the street-facing side of the townhomes, where residents across the way would actually see them, rather than the garage side. It specified five-inch-exposure lap siding, smaller than the nine-inch the renderings showed, as the New England-appropriate scale. It wanted double-hung windows with simulated divided light rather than casements. For Lot B, where the units run closer together, the committee asked for a mix of all-brick, all-clapboard, and mixed buildings to create what one member called "little neighborhoods" rather than a uniform row, with the all-brick buildings anchored along the main road and by the clubhouse.
The single-family homes on Lot C drew three concept designs from architect Jack Kemper, who recused himself from the meeting. The committee liked them and asked for one thing in return: do not group the houses by size. "I'd prefer to see it jumbled up instead of all the big houses in one area, all little houses in another," one member said. Another wanted "some order in that jumbling so it's not completely random, but there's a discernible order to it." The chair summarized the instruction as "not a scattering of seeds, but not a strict block approach either."
Driveways, sidewalks, and the fences that worried everyone
The committee set numbers it wants TPZ to hold the developer to: driveways at least 25 feet from the back of the sidewalk to the garage face, so a parked SUV does not block the walk; five-to-six-foot concrete sidewalks with concrete curbs, not asphalt, which one member noted "lasts about a month."
Fences took longer. The Enclave is planned as a common-interest community, with shared green space rather than individual lots, and several members worried that letting residents put up solid six-foot fences would carve the shared landscape into a patchwork and erase the river views the green corridor was designed to protect. "If they let fences go up, that's going to destroy the whole aesthetic of this entire project," one member said. The committee's recommendation: cap any fencing at roughly three-and-a-half to four feet, see-through and ornamental rather than solid, and leave the decision of whether to allow fences at all to the homeowners association the development will eventually form.
The bigger question the committee kept circling
For all the detail, the committee was working without the final say, and members knew it. The project still has to clear the July 13 TPZ hearing, the substantive decision point, where the zoning questions, the wetlands buffer to the river, and the road connections get decided with binding effect.
A late comment from the floor pushed past the architecture entirely. The development is being pitched in part to empty-nesters, with first-floor primary suites in the Lot A townhomes, but also to young families in the smaller units. "You're talking about closely close homes, small yards," the commenter said. "Where are those children going to play? What about bike paths to enjoy the river?" Rutherford noted those questions belong to TPZ and said she would raise them there.
The applicant got the recommendation it came for. "It's a better project than it was when we first did this to you," Brandt told the committee. The committee, which cannot vote, agreed.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, Farmington, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. A development that spends two evenings deciding which side of a roof the dormers go on is a development that cares about keeping things in their proper place. So does Farmington Storage, at institutional grade. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's land-use boards long enough to know that a committee with no vote can still run a three-hour meeting, and that the meeting is usually where the building actually gets designed. He is on his third coffee. The site plan is 80 acres. He read the whole thing. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the design committee that shaped a 237-unit development one dormer at a time, the zoning hearing that will actually decide it, the police log you would never find unless someone typed it up. We publish slowly, deliberately, and without apology. Always last to breaking news, thorough about everything else. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰