Story originally appeared in the Indianapolis Business Journal
Keith Lash was still in his 20s when he received the career opportunity of a lifetime.
The project imagined by Tom Huston and George Sweet, co-founders of the prolific Carmel-based firm Brenwick Development Co., would turn about 760 acres of farmland at the intersection of Main Street and Towne Road on Carmel’s west side into the Village of WestClay, a quaint community that mimics small-town life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Village of WestClay is an example of “traditional neighborhood design,” which is part of an architectural concept called New Urbanism that was popularized in the 1980s and 1990s as a way to push back on suburban sprawl and create intimate, walkable neighborhoods.
“The attention to detail was something I’ve not experienced elsewhere in my career,” said Lash, who joined Brenwick in 2002 and is now division president for the Indianapolis office of Fort Mitchell-based homebuilder Drees Homes. “You can have a great vision, but if you don’t execute the details, the vision won’t come to fruition. [Huston and Sweet] were very much focused on the details.”
Twenty-five years after the Village of WestClay opened during a two-week home show in July 2000, the neighborhood is best known for its more than 1,000 houses built in historic architectural styles, such as Federal, Italianate, Greek Revival, Gothic Revival and Tudor.
“It’s like a step back in a time portal,” said Terry O’Brien, a Village resident since 2016.
Currently, houses for sale in the Village range from $189,900 for a one-bedroom town house to $3.5 million for a 9,843- square-foot house with five bedrooms and 6-1/2 bathrooms, according to Realtor.com.
Home values in the Village of WestClay outpace the rest of Carmel and Hamilton County. The average sale price for a house in the village last year was $223 per square foot versus
$204 in Carmel and $190 in Hamilton County, according to numbers provided by the Village of WestClay Owners Association Inc.
Today, more than 5,000 people live in the Village of WestClay, including 28 multigenerational families of grown children, parents and grandparents.
In total, there are 1,840 residences, which include single-family houses, town houses, condominiums, apartments and senior- living units on both sides of Main Street.
A plan for the Village of WestClay submitted in 1998 to the city of Carmel called for 1,391 houses and 225 apartments. A retirement community called The Stratford, an addition that opened in 2009, offers independent living, assisted living and memory care services.
“When [Brenwick] did that development in west Carmel, it really kind of set up all the other land in west Carmel to be very sought after,” said Steve Pittman, CEO of Zionsville-based Pittman Partners who developed the Estates of Clay West, a gated community of 20 houses east of the Village at Main Street and Ditch Road.
A project that started with 12 custom builders grew to nearly 50 homebuilders who completed projects in the village, which has unusually strict architectural requirements.
Brenwick spent $18 million on amenities, including neighborhood parks, recreation facilities and a three-story Greek Revival meeting house.
“Overall, it’s such a unique project,” Lash said. “I would classify it as a career-legacy project. Not many people have an opportunity to work on that type of project. It’s a one-of-a-kind in the Indianapolis metro area, for sure.”
Building a legacy
Huston and Sweet co-founded Brenwick in 1976. Over a 30- year career, they built 29 developments, including more than 4,000 houses in central Indiana. Thirteen of Brenwick’s developments are in Carmel, including the Village of WestClay, Prairie View and Waterstone. Sweet died in 2021.
“[The Village of WestClay] was a culmination. It was the last thing we wanted to do. We knew it was risky,” Huston said. “Everything we thought we learned in the business over 25 years, we took what we thought worked, and we put it in here.”
Former Mayor Jim Brainard, whom Huston credited with making the village happen, said Huston’s and Sweet’s shared vision for their communities in Carmel was crucial to the growth of the city.
“Having Brenwick Development with Tom Huston and George Sweet was absolutely critical to Carmel’s success, along with a group of local, not national, builders … people who lived here and cared about building the community right,” Brainard said.
The Village of WestClay’s pedestrian-friendly layout and mix of housing types, restaurants and retail shops became a model that would continue over the next quarter-century in redevelopment projects across Carmel.
“As a resident, you can walk to dinner, you can walk to your doctor’s office, you can walk to the bookstore, get your nails done, a massage, the library,” said Jeff Terp, a 20-year resident of the neighborhood who is executive director of the Village of WestClay Owners Association. “Everybody that’s a resident of the village is a 10-minute walk or less from a park to take their kids and their family.”
Huston and Sweet introduced their concept for the Village of WestClay to Brainard not long after he took office in 1996.
Huston said the idea came from his experience of living in the historic Meridian-Kessler neighborhood in Indianapolis for almost 40 years.
“People love living in Meridian-Kessler, except for the schools, and they don’t have any closets,” Huston said. “And if you can create a Meridian-Kessler that has a good school system and homes that have closets, I think we’ve got a market.”
The project faced obstacles early in the process, starting with opposition from nearby residents and from members of the Carmel Plan Commission, who twice rejected the proposal. It
also took a while for homebuilders to understand what Huston and Sweet wanted to do.
“Why are you trying to be architecturally significant?” Terp said. “Why do you want a Victorian to look like a Victorian? Why do you want a Neo-Gothic to look like a Neo-Gothic? Why do you want an Italianate? Architects and builders didn’t really know what that meant.”
To demonstrate what they wanted, Huston and Sweet began recruiting custom homebuilders, who joined them on an architectural tour in Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina. Brainard said Huston “kept very strict control on every architectural detail, every landscaping detail.”
“If you wanted to be on the list to be sold a lot in the Village of WestClay, you had to personally [go]. You couldn’t send your assistant,” Brainard said. “The guy that owned the custom builder had to go on that trip.”
Historical details are important to Huston, who served as an aide in the Nixon Administration and served as a board member at the Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana (now
Indiana Landmarks), but he said his opinion could be swayed if people followed one rule.
“My wife would ask, ‘Why in the hell would you approve a purple house?’” he said. “I said my rule was that if you could show me an existing house from the Victorian period is purple or any other color, you can use that color. The guy showed up with a picture of a purple house in San Francisco. I told him that was the rule. ‘You show me a picture; you get to do what the hell you want.’”
Finishing the job
A commercial district that struggled to get off the ground for nearly 15 years through two recessions and a banking crisis now has 254,800 square feet of office, retail and restaurant space.
Two areas—the pedestrian-focused Village Center in the middle of the neighborhood’s core, and Uptown, which is more easily accessed by motorists at the southwest corner of Main Street and Towne Road—are home to more than 100 businesses.
“The recession stalled everything [in the Village Center]. But [Brenwick] stuck to it, and they continued to stick to the original vision, whereas other developers would have just gotten rid of stuff and walked away to get the heck out of there,” said David Klain, owner of DB Klain Construction LLC. “These guys cared.”
Construction is expected to begin later this year on the final commercial parcel in the Village Center, said Klain, who purchased the remaining 4-1/2 acres of vacant commercial property in 2016 from Huston and Sweet. DB Klain Construction is headquartered in the Village Center.
Klain started building houses in the Village of WestClay in 2002. He built his first commercial building in the Village Center in 2006, the same year he moved his office to the village. Klain and his wife, Sherri, have lived there since 2009, and his mother and two grown sons also live there.
Klain said he was “fully invested” when he bet on the future of the Village Center. Up to that point, there was concern that businesses would not thrive within the Village Center because of its distance from Main Street. However, Klain said he was confident it would work.
He focused on finding business owners who wanted to be building owners and did not want third-party investors he felt were not committed to the community.
Now, Klain said, the Village Center is 100% leased and occupied. He said people come from about a 4-mile radius to visit bars and restaurants, such as Sahm’s Ale House and Danny Boy Beer Works, or to go to the neighborhood branch of the Carmel-Clay Public Library.
“We had a vision of how to make that happen,” Klain said. “Everybody kept saying there’s no way the retail and office would work inside the village. It needed to be out on the Main Street down on the corner, and everybody’s convinced it would never work. I saw it a little differently than everybody else.”