With hundreds of new homes, commercial space and new amenities on the way, a Brunswick County master planned development is charting its next course.

Landscape architect, developer and builder Scott Stewart sees Compass Pointe, a 2,200-acre community off U.S. 74, as a development that’s in balance with nature while at the same time “strategically positioned at the future crossroads of commerce.”

A new master plan for Compass Pointe that Stewart has created, in conjunction with property owner Bobby Harrelson, is designed to weather economic changes in the coming years, including features of Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND), Stewart said.

The development of Compass Pointe began eight years ago, around the same time that the nation’s economy experienced one of the worst downturns in history, and residential and commercial development throughout the Cape Fear region took a big hit. These days, a steadily improving housing market has led to an increase in the construction of new homes in Compass Pointe and elsewhere.   

“Every neighborhood goes through its cycles. You have to be able to plan and prepare for all the cycles,” Steward said during a recent tour that highlighted Compass Pointe’s latest development activity. “What my role is here is to ensure that the neighborhood sustains through those cycles with the right patterns of growth and the efficiency of the infrastructure and all the related costs that are going in right now.”

One of Stewart’s current projects within Compass Pointe is a neighborhood that will be called Hammocks Cove and that he designed with an alley system.

By using alleys, “What you’re doing is compartmentalizing and organizing the home site for the end user and the residents so not only is the floor plan very user friendly, it’s married to the uses of the yard space,” Stewart said.

Hammocks Cove, which will have more than 80 homes and is the first of seven new neighborhoods in Compass Pointe that are currently in design and development stages, is on track to have all of its required final maps filed with Brunswick County officials by the first or second week of April, Stewart said.

“It certainly is one of the more actively developing projects right now,” said Mark Pages, land planner in Brunswick County’s planning department. “The Leland area seems to be very healthy [in terms of new home development] between Compass Pointe and Brunswick Forest and probably a couple other developments like Hawkeswater [Villages].”

Those elements of new urbanism and TND favored by Stewart seem
to have become more desirable, Pages said.

“That’s the trend in planning right now, the type of things that Scott does,” Pages said.
Brunswick County was hit hard by the Great Recession, with some planned neighborhoods left languishing and dubbed “zombie” developments.

“There’s still a lot of inventory of lots in Brunswick County,” Pages said. “We haven’t seen any brand new approved developments.”

But property owners in general seem to be starting to regain confidence as the economy steadily improves.

“There are some kind of preliminary talks about ‘Hey, what can we do at this property,’ whereas before there’d been nothing. Silence,” Pages said. “Now people are starting to come in and really try to look at what they can do and who knows? The way the winter’s going up north, maybe this is the last straw for a lot of northerners.”

Compass Pointe closed on 202 lots last year, Harrelson said, adding that the 202 sales figure hasn’t been watered down by counting multiple transactions. Many of the new residents listed on a dry erase board in the Compass Pointe sales office moved from the Northeast, a majority from communities in New York and New Jersey.

Stewart himself moved from the Northeast, where during his career he had worked as a design and marketing consultant in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, to Wilmington in 1993. Since 1994, Stewart has designed and developed four TND neighborhoods in the Wilmington area: Demarest Landing, Demarest Village, Tidal Reach and Devaun Park.

“Scott’s a great planner. Great planners are like great artists,” Harrelson said, and by moving from the Northeast, “he knew what people wanted to get away from.”

In addition to Hammocks Cove, Stewart has been designing a new entrance to Compass Pointe on U.S. 74 and a mixed-use area that will include commercial, service-oriented components.

“We could have everything from small shops or we could have a small food store or we could have hotels. It’s the design and land plan to accommodate all those uses without changing patterns we got approved or the infrastructure we’re putting in,” Stewart said.
Potential names for the commercial development are Village Square or Compass Commons.

“The idea is to create an intimate village square that’s scaled properly so you’re not making a large, expansive parking lot where you have to rip down all the trees,” Stewart said.

About 350 families already live in Compass Pointe. Harrelson said about 10 years from now, the community is expected to have between 2,000 and 2,500 owners. Currently, excluding custom homes, prices at Compass Pointe mainly fall in the $300,000 to $475,000 range, Harrelson said.

“We think that’s where a great number of sales will take place,” he said.

But the most important aspect of Compass Pointe in Harrelson’s opinion is its overall goal to provide a place where people can live the dreams they had during their
working lives, Harrelson said. 

Along those lines, a variety of new amenities are in the works, including a golf course designed by Rick Robbins, additional pools and a new 30-acre lake under construction that will become a focal point.

The No. 1 thing enjoyed by people, Harrelson said, seems to be walking, and Compass Pointe has placed an emphasis on sidewalks and walking trails.

Trails in the more than 820 acres of the development that are under a conservation easement will be expanded, according to Compass Pointe’s new plans.

Although work on the golf course had been slowed by this winter’s rainfall, Harrelson said he expects the course to be opened in the late fall.

“It’s been our goal to provide activities that would reach all different kinds of people and give them things they can enjoy,” Harrelson said.