What Happens When a Developer Trusts You ….Twice

The best projects don't always start with a blank slate.

Sometimes they start with a problem. A 1920s landmark hotel on the Virginia coast that had seen better days. A developer who believed the building was worth saving — but needed to figure out how to pay for it. And a site that could accommodate new homes, if the homes were designed with enough care not to overwhelm what made the place worth coming to in the first place.

That was the brief for the Cavalier Residences. And it's where our firm's relationship with the cottage court typology really began.

The Cavalier Hotel: A Landmark That Needed a Strategy

Cavalier Illustrative Plan by EDSA

The Cavalier Hotel opened in 1927 on a hilltop overlooking Virginia Beach. In its heyday it was one of the great resort hotels of the mid-Atlantic — hosting presidents, celebrities, and generations of families who came back year after year. By the time our client acquired it, the building needed a comprehensive renovation. The question was how to fund it.

One part of the answer was 81 new homes on the hotel grounds, with a land plan by EDSA. Market-rate, for-sale residences that would bring new life to the site, generate some of the capital needed to restore the landmark, and create a neighborhood around a building that had always been more than just a hotel.

Eighty-one homes is a significant number. The challenge was placing them on a historic site without destroying the character that justified the investment in the first place. Most of the homes could be positioned to respect the hotel's presence and scale. But one piece of the site was different — a sensitive zone between the hotel's motor court and the surrounding streets, where the density needed to be high enough to contribute to the project's economics but the scale needed to stay human, quiet, and residential while saving some existing trees.

That's the problem the cottage court was designed to solve.

The Cavalier Cottage Court: Nine Cottages, One Green

We designed six cottages cottage plans, and nine unique

elevations,  ranging from 600 to 767 heated square feet. Each with a front porch facing a shared brick pedestrian path and central green. The entire court fits on half an acre — 18 dwelling units per acre — which is genuine missing middle density delivered at a scale that feels nothing like density.

The key decision that made it feel that way: we designed the court around the existing live oak trees rather than clearing the site and planting new ones. The oaks didn't just provide shade — they gave the court the one thing you can't buy with a construction budget: the feeling that the cottages have always been there. Standing in the court, under a canopy that took decades to grow, it's impossible to tell that any of this  was built in the last ten years. That's not an accident. It's a design decision that required working with the site rather than against it. A fire pit at the heart of the court for community gatherings. Mature live oaks preserved as the canopy overhead. Parking pulled to the perimeter via an alley, so the court itself remained car-free.

Each cottage has a distinct plan — mirrored pairs, varied orientations, slightly different programs. No two units are identical in experience even when the floor plans are close.

View in to the court with the existing live oak

The design decisions that made the court work were deliberate:

The scale stays domestic. From Cavalier Drive, the court reads as a cluster of cottages in a garden, not a housing development. The hotel's presence is felt — you can see it from the green — but the cottages don't compete with it. They belong to the same world. The entries are individual. Every resident comes home to their own front door, their own stoop, their own threshold. There is no lobby, no corridor, no buzzer panel. The sense of having a home — not a unit — was non-negotiable.

The shared space is the heart. The brick path, the green, the fire pit — these aren't amenities. They're the reason the court works as a community. Within months of the first residents moving in, neighbors were gathering at the fire pit without being organized or programmed to do so. That's the test.

The Cavalier Cottage Court won a Merit Award from the Urban Guild in 2019 — recognition from the organization that understands this kind of work better than almost anyone. The award mattered less for the recognition than for what it confirmed: that the design had achieved what it set out to do.

What the Market Said

The cottages sold well. In a development of 81 homes that included larger single-family houses and townhouses at significantly higher price points, the cottage court found its audience quickly — buyers who wanted to be part of the Cavalier community, who valued the shared landscape and the human scale, and who were perfectly happy with 600 to 700 square feet when those square feet were well designed.

View of fire pit in the shared Courtyard

The market was telling us something. Not every buyer wants a large home. Not every buyer wants to maintain a yard. A surprising number of buyers — empty nesters, young professionals, people who travel frequently and want a lock-and-leave home they love coming back to — are perfectly served by a beautifully designed small cottage with a front porch and a shared garden. The Cavalier proved that this buyer exists in the Virginia Beach market, and that they'll pay appropriately for the right product. And the market is telling us something today as these homes come up for resale they are often doubling in price from their original price.

Our developer client paid attention.

East Beach: The Same Typology, A Different Problem

East Beach is a traditional neighborhood development in Norfolk, Virginia — one of the more successful TNDs on the mid-Atlantic coast. When our client came back to us with an East Beach opportunity, the context was different from the Cavalier in almost every way except one: the problem being solved.

The East Beach master plan had been conceived with a certain mix of housing types. Market conditions had shifted. The developer wanted to introduce a smaller for-sale product into a neighborhood that was dominated by larger single-family homes and townhouses. The cottage court offered exactly what the market was asking for — a smaller footprint, a lower entry price point, a different kind of living experience within the same TND framework.

The site at East Beach is more urban than the Cavalier. It sits on a corner of a busier street, with the internal green fed from an alley rather than a quiet residential drive. Parking is handled at the edges of the site. The cottages on the street corners are dual-fronted — they address both the public street and the shared green, so the court is visible and legible from the sidewalk while the interior world of the green remains intimate.

Ten units on 0.86 acres — 11.6 dwelling units per acre. Similar scale to the Cavalier. Similar architecture — the same coastal traditional character, the same craft in the details, the same emphasis on porches and entries and the quality of the threshold between public and private. But organized differently in response to a different site, a different street relationship, a different way of arriving.

East Beach Cottage Court

Look at the site from above and the design logic becomes clear immediately. The site is a wedge — an irregular parcel bounded by a major arterial on the west, a curved  street on the south, and an alley system on the east. A conventional developer might have struggled to make that geometry work. The cottage court thrives in it. A single salmon-brick pedestrian spine runs the full length of the parcel, connecting two distinct sub-greens — one at the northern end, one at the southern — into a continuous sequence of outdoor rooms. The cottages at the northern corners are dual-fronted, addressing both the busy public street and the interior green simultaneously. From the intersection, the court reads as a cluster of homes in a garden. From inside, it feels completely removed from the traffic sixty feet away. Parking lives entirely at the perimeter, accessed from the alley, invisible from the pedestrian spine. Not a single car penetrates the green.

Where the Cavalier court feels tucked into a landscape — discovered rather than announced — the East Beach court engages its corner more directly. The dual-fronted cottages are doing two things at once: contributing to the streetscape of the TND while creating the enclosed garden logic that makes the court work as a community. It's a harder design problem, and it required more careful calibration of what faces the street versus what faces the green.

The result is a court that feels genuinely urban — more connected to its neighborhood than the Cavalier — without losing the intimacy that makes the typology worth building in the first place.

View of the East Beach Cottage Court

What a Developer Learns From Building Two

Our client came back for the East Beach court for two reasons. First, the Cavalier cottages had been well received — the market response was clear and the residents were happy. Second, the TND needed a smaller product, and the developer knew from experience that the cottage court could deliver it.

The Urban Guild award for the Cavalier came after the East Beach decision was already made. But it confirmed what the developer had already concluded from watching the Cavalier perform in the market: that the cottage court isn't a niche product for a specific buyer. It's a flexible typology that can be adapted to different sites, different contexts, and different positions in a neighborhood's housing mix — and that it consistently creates value, both financially and in terms of the quality of life it produces for the people who live in it.

That's the lesson two projects for the same client teaches you. Not just that the typology works in one place. That it works in different places, for different reasons, in different ways.

The Principle Behind Both Projects

Looking across the Cavalier and East Beach courts, the design principles that made both work are the same:

The court is car-free. Parking lives at the perimeter — on the street or via an alley — so the shared green can be a garden rather than a parking lot.

Each unit reads as a home. Individual entries,  individual porches, individual character. No corridors, no lobbies, no shared vestibules. You come home to a front door.

Bay detail of one of the Cottages

The shared space is designed, not leftover. The green is the heart of the court. It's sized to encourage use, planted to provide shade and enclosure, and programmed only with a fire pit — enough to catalyze community without over-organizing it.

The street relationship is honest. Both courts are legible from the street — a passerby can understand what they're looking at. Neither hides itself or withdraws from the neighborhood. The cottage court is a gift to its surroundings as much as to its residents.

Scale is restrained deliberately. The units are small because small, well-designed homes on shared land are a fundamentally different product from large homes on individual lots. The restraint is the point.

Coming Next

Both of these courts are built. Both performed well in the market. Both earned the developer's confidence — which is how you end up with a second commission, and a third.

The third chapter in this story is three cottage courts under design right now for a new traditional neighborhood development outside Norman, Oklahoma — for a different developer who found our work and asked whether the typology could scale.

It can. That article is coming.

I'm an architect focused on traditional neighborhood design, new urbanism, and building code reform. If you're a developer working on a project where the cottage court typology might solve a problem — a site that needs a smaller product, a neighborhood that needs a gentle density option, a historic context that needs careful handling — I'd welcome the conversation.