A View for Everyone

Three years ago, Gary Hirshberg decided Northwest Arkansas had a fair sampling of elite neighborhoods. What the market needed, he says, was an upscale community for everyone.

Hirshberg, the project and construction manager for Valley View Golf Community, is building his dream development three miles south of U.S. Highway 62 in Farmington. The $20 million, 380-acre project will eventually include large single-family lots, townhomes and one-story family units clustered around European-style courtyards.

Valley View’s $11 million Phase I will take up 270 acres and include a championship-length public golf course, 165 single-family homesites and 332 condominium townhomes. The golf course will open by Labor Day and residential lots are already being shown to prospective buyers.

What separates Valley View from the area’s other trendy communities, Hirshberg says, is its inventory diversity. Lots begin at $19,900 and go to $62,000, compared with a range of $50,000 to $300,000 per lot at Pinnacle Golf & Country Club in Rogers. Lots at Hissom Ranch, another golf community that aims to compete with Pinnacle, are expected to be several acres each and cost $100,000 to $125,000.

Bill Grisso, Valley View’s director of sales, was the original sales manager at Pinnacle before its name changed from Champions. He says, while Champions filled a once-needed upscale niche, there’s more demand in 2000 for lots like the ones available at Valley View.

“At Champions,” Grisso says, “you had a handful of very wealthy Wal-Mart, Tyson and J.B. Hunt retirees and or executives who were just waiting for that kind of extremely high-dollar development to come in. But years later, Valley View has more diversification.

“You can live here for the same amount, and sometimes less, than any upscale suburb in Northwest Arkansas.”

Valley View’s townhomes may be as small as 1,200 SF and will likely sell for about $110,000 each. Grisso says that’s perfect for couples or single people with no children or pets. Single-family homes must be at least 1,700 SF and may range as high as $300,000 or more.

“Make no mistake,” Grisso says. “Valley View will be an upscale community.” But the aim is to not limit development to a single type of upscale structure.

“If a guy wants to come in and build a 3,500-SF home that’s $320,000 or up, he can do it,” Grisso says. “Or if a couple who doesn’t need much room wants a more modest-sized and priced home, they can have that here, too.”

Michael Thomas, owner of MHT Communications/Marketing in Fayetteville, and Grisso officially joined Hirshberg’s development team in September. The triumvirate is spearheading Valley View’s marketing, sales and development, respectively.

Their mantra is that Valley View will “create a community,” instead of just being another upscale subdivision inserted into one.

Natural view

Arkansas Highway 170 curls three miles off of Farmington’s main drag, past horse and Beefmaster cattle farms, to Valley View’s entrance near Giles Road. In 1862, Civil War encampments from the Battle of Prairie Grove set up near the property’s creek to draw fresh water from its natural spring. Most recently, Irene and the late Henry Giles and their daughter and son-in-law, Darlene and Raymond Rush, operated 240 acres of the property as a Bermuda grass farm.

Valley View Golf Properties LLC — the project’s holding company, owned by J.C. and Sharon Selph and Susan Yermack all of Elkins — bought the land from Giles in 1997 with $7.1 million in tax-free bonds from Bank of Oklahoma. Those bonds were later sold to American Express Investments.

The parent company also secured another $4 million for the golf course with a U.S. Small Business Administration loan arranged by Arkansas Capital Investments in Little Rock and Trans America Small Business Loan Capital in Dallas.

Despite the fact several years have passed since the land was an operating Bermuda farm, Hirshberg says the natural grass still growing on site makes the course more playable than some other more mature courses in the area.

The 7,085-yard course — being built and managed by the internationally prominent Neibur Golf Development Inc. of Colorado Springs, Colo. — will serve as the center of the development’s green space. It will feature bent grass greens, numerous hazard ponds and, because of an elaborate drainage system, will be the only upscale public course in the area where players are allowed to drive electric carts on the fairways.

It’s the biggest chunk of the $6 million Valley View is spending on open green space, wetlands preservation and construction of an odor- and sludge-free application/irrigation system. But golf will be far from the property’s only amenity.

There will be neighborhood parks, gardens, tennis and volleyball courts, a swimming pool, multi-purpose playing fields, clubhouse and seven acres of natural bluff area that will be preserved and used for a nature trail overlooking South Creek.

Hirshberg says Valley View is trying a different approach than most developments in that its open space is intentional. Its open areas, where homes may not be built, aren’t just for drainage, they’re to enhance what Hirshberg says are the three best things about the property.

“Location, lifestyle and lasting value is what this community offers,” Hirshberg says.

The vision

Valley View’s website, at www.vvgc.net, gives prospective residents great details about what they can expect from the development’s extensive management team. But what it doesn’t say is the whole concept came about because Hirshberg took up golf again after a 20-year hiatus.

A graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago with a master’s degree in interior design, Hirshberg worked for a number of years as an associate architect with Playboy Clubs Inc. helping design Playboy Mansions all over the world. But after years in the big city, Hirshberg wanted to get back to nature.

He and his wife, Susan, moved to Fay-etteville and founded their bottled water company Pinnacle Mountain Waters Inc. Hirshberg, who grew up on the Wingpark Golf Course in Elgin, Ill., soon determined he couldn’t find an affordable golf course in Northwest Arkansas that was also playable.

Since then, Hirshberg says, Stonebridge Meadows Golf Club opened to give Fayetteville a nice public course. But by then Hirshberg was well on his way to building his own. He started assembling what he calls “maybe the best development team ever assembled in the state.”

It includes the Audubon Wildlife Sanctuary, numerous waste water and wetlands engineers and landscape architects from across the country. Hirshberg found Thomas and Grisso through referrals from the Blackwood Martin advertising agency and local real estate agent Hal Henson, respectively.

Grisso, who keeps a horse shoe in his SUV that was given to him by retired rancher Dash Goff, moved to Northwest Arkansas 14 years ago from Heber Springs. He says the opportunity to work on a development that offered more of a cross section community was too exciting to turn down.

“I really believe in Gary’s vision for Valley View,” Grisso says. “He’s not taking enough credit for all of the outstanding planning he’s done here. This is going to be a beautiful community.”