Leading a phalanx of golf course designers, builders and engineers, Keith Vinson strolls 200 acres of pastures his company plans to convert to an Arnold Palmer golf course.

"I've hired the finest professionals in the area for golf course design and construction," says Vinson, wearing shades and a leather jacket, as some of the men look at charts of the future golf course or talk on cell phones. "There's only one way to do this, and that's the right way."

The 18-hole out-and-back golf course will be the main drawing card for the 1,400-acre Seven Falls development, a gated community planned to contain about 900 homes. But Vinson will happily tell you about other amenities — six miles of walking trails around waterfalls and the French Broad River, and the 500 acres of open space, which he calls "massive."

Seven Falls is the largest of three developments that will forever change this sleepy community where the French Broad River meanders through western Henderson County.

Trailers and farm houses are mostly empty along Pleasant Grove Church Road. Vinson's firm, Mountain Development Co. of Asheville, bought an entire valley.

From where Folly Creek seeps out of springs on Judd Wilson Mountain, down through the thick rhododendron and over splashing waterfalls, the gated golf community will fill what is now a blank spot on the county map.

The thick woods and rolling pastures punctuated by granite outcropings and old farmsteads will all give way to upscale homes, a "village" with trendy shops, tennis courts and swimming pools. The pastures descending gently to the French Broad River are "one of the most natural sites for golf I have ever seen," Palmer says in promotional materials for the project.

Economic 'tension'

Seven Falls will be a high-dollar gated development of the kind increasingly popping up across the mountains. The 191 custom single-family homes will be priced in the $900,000's, while smaller golf villas and cottages will start in the $600,000's.

These will be clustered around a town village featuring a coffee shop, bakery, general store, wine store and bistro, wellness center and swim club
with indoor and outdoor pools, said Harry Redfearn, whose firm Private Mountain Communities will market and sell the project.

The development will include 18 town homes and 36 condominiums as well. The balance will include more than 676 large-estate home sites of about two acres each, priced starting in the $300,000s, land only.

Those prices seem unreal to local residents who work regular jobs to pay mortgages on their homes.

"It seems it is harder for the working-class people like us to afford homes now," said Michelle Marsh, 32, who lives with her husband, Robert, an employee at the Raflatac label plant, in the Maplewood subdivision. "It (expensive gated developments) drives the price of other homes up."

Ike Kennerly, pastor of Etowah Presbyterian Church, says his congregation of 65 is made up mainly of long-time residents. Many are wary of the changes exclusive developments may bring to Etowah.

"There's a certain tension among folks whose adult children have a hard time affording a place to buy," he says. Redfearn says a market study indicates about half the buyers of properties in Seven Falls will be from the "local trade-up market"
with the remainder from out of the area buying second and vacation homes.

Road to move, cemeteries stay

Plans for Seven Falls call for relocating a short section of Pleasant Grove Church Road up a hill to near the property line of the development between the old church cemetery and Pleasant Grove Road.

The road will stay open, along with access to the church cemetery, which is outside the subdivision, and the Fletcher cemetery on former Fullam dairy land inside the subdivision, project engineer Bill Lapsley said.

Seven Falls is among three large Etowah projects to come before the Henderson County Planning Department since Jan. 1. The others are the Bluffs at Waters Edge, originally planned as 268 town homes and single-family homes on 76 acres off Eade Road, but now being revised, and a Biltmore Farms development on 518 acres of Hammond family farmland between McKinney Road and the French Broad River.

The Biltmore project will feature 641 lots including single-family, duplex, triplex and quadplex housing units. The same company had planned 109 town homes and cluster homes on Turnpike Road in Mills River, but the Mills River Town Council last week rejected that project as a bad fit for the town's rural character.

Etowah is an old community facing major change, resident Farrah Keener says. Her sister lives across McKinney Road from the proposed site of the Biltmore Farms project. The influx of newcomers concerns Kenner and some other residents of the once sleepy farming community.

"We moved out here three years ago from Arden because it's a nice, quiet place," said Keener, a stay-at-home mom who lives with her two children and husband, Jeff, on Brickyard Road. "We saw Airport Road (N.C. 280) turn into five lanes with the Target and the Super Wal-Mart. We saw Biltmore Park go up and its the kind of
conglomeration I'd rather not see in this area."

'Development dream team'

Vinson, an Asheville resident, has in the past acquired and sold large tracts, including partnering with Kent Smith to buy land that was sold for the Cliffs at Walnut Cove in Buncombe County, Redfearn says.

Redfearn previously worked for the Cliffs communities, but he and Vinson say they are not otherwise associated with the Cliffs developer Jim Anthony, or with Biltmore Farms.

Seven Falls, Redfearn says, is the first large-scale project Vinson has developed himself. To do it, he has assembled what Redfearn calls the "development dream team." The group includes Lapsley, an influential Henderson County engineer in land planning and engineering, and Historical Concepts/Jim Strickland lead architect, which will develop the town village for the project. Strickland's company developed Spring Island and Palmetto Bluff, a pair of exclusive developments on the South Carolina coast marketed as environmentally sensitive.

East West Partners, which manages upscale resorts, will manage the club. And there is the Palmer Course Design Company.

Walking up Pleasant Grove Church Road, past the old cemetery to where Folly Creek freefalls 25 feet over a granite cliff in a grove of cedar and hemlock, Vinson says Seven Falls will be "all green" from construction through operations. The golf course will be built and maintained to protect the environment, and even chemical-treated lumber will be banned. Residents, he says, will be able to walk "miles of hiking trails, from waterfall to waterfall. We think it's going to
be nice."