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 Printable PDF
Neighborhood Spotlight
Beecham Builders - Montaluce
6/1/08
Simple Pleasures
Montaluce Evokes a Place to Live
By Blake Warenik • Photography courtesy of Chris Hornaday
You can do a lot to customize your home, to make it a reflection of your and your family’s tastes, interests and even dreams. From simple weekend projects to complex home additions, you can make your home into almost anything you want, if you’re willing to give it the time, money and, most of all, love. Unfortunately, the same generally isn’t true of neighborhoods. Maybe your home is your castle, your garden its countryside, but take one step off the property, and you’re in someone else’s dream.
Which leads to the crux of the matter—why do we want a custom home? We’re not doing it to impress anyone; we do it because we understand that surroundings affect people. In a disposable culture, we are making a statement that we aren’t going anywhere. We customize because we love the stuff of life—family, food, company, beauty. Why not seek out a community created with those things paramount? A place where the architecture, the facilities, and the people it attracts all live and breathe the good life. Somewhere that prizes nothing trivial, but only the things that really matter: the land you live on, the people you love and the dinner table you share.
You don’t even have to move to Italy to find it. Somehow, it’s right here in Georgia, little more than an hour from Atlanta.
It’s called Montaluce, and it’s a new concept in planned communities. The Roswell-based family of builder/developers has seen enough of golf-oriented communities and the like. There are enough places to play—why no places to live?
So Beecham Builders, a firm with a long reputation in and around Atlanta for ancestral-quality, custom homes—along with partner Bobby Greenway of Greenway Development—set to work dreaming up something new. The basis of Montaluce wasn’t the most obvious thing, but it’s something poetic and universal, something that many people love but that no one completely understands: wine.
Well, not just wine, but a whole lifestyle revolving around wine—drinking it and making it, how it makes us feel and what it makes us forget. But even teetotalers can appreciate the other things that go with it: food, family, conversation, nature and home.
What they created is a community centered on vineyards and a winery and inspired by the Tuscan lifestyle. The 400-acre site near Dahlonega is among the most stunning riverfront property in North Georgia, and strangely, as the beautiful Tuscan-style villas take shape and the vines grow green again, the red Georgia hills seem to transform into the Florentine countryside.
About 300 homes are to be built on the property, and each adheres to a basic architectural ethic, researched in Tuscany by the architects and built with authentic materials but to completely modern specifications.
The custom estates, villas and cottages are stunning, but the heart of the project is the 25,000-square-foot winery/restaurant complex, nestled among the vines in the center of the property. The winery begins production using Georgia and California grapes this fall and expects to use its own grapes for the 2009 vintage. The restaurant is a fine-dining concept called Le Vigne, basing its cuisine on modern interpretations of traditional Tuscan dishes.
The winery complex also houses a conference center, a gourmet shop, a homeowners’ club for Montaluce residents and their guests, and a private (some would say secret) dining room down in the cool space among the fermentation vats. In the coming months and years, there are plans for organic gardens and smokehouses from which the restaurant will draw its ingredients.
This kind of life, he said, would not only be possible among the red Georgia hills—it would be just the thing to help people escape the chaos of modern life.
“It’s a very rich concept, but simple,” Beecham says. “And somehow, no one has thought to do anything like this before. We’ve researched it, and as far as we know, we’re the only one in the country. It’s a real different idea.”
You can say that again.
So while you’re looking to upgrade your home, maybe it’s time to think about whether your surroundings need an upgrade, too, and pay a visit to Montaluce.
For more information on making your home at Montaluce, please feel free to visit www.montaluce.com or call (800) 251-4385.
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