Southern Development Homes at Old Trail Village.

Overview

The model home at 5420 Golf Drive sits close enough to the Old Trail Golf Club that the road signs point the same way. This is where Southern Development Homes keeps its foot on the ground in Old Trail Village, the residential neighborhood spread across the western edge of Crozet with the Blue Ridge rising behind it. Come in through the front door and you are walking through a floor plan you could actually buy, laid out to show what the builder puts into the houses it raises here.

Southern Development is a homebuilder, and Old Trail Village is one of its communities. What they sell on this particular site is a fairly focused menu: single-family homes and townhomes, running from 1,571 to 1,882 square feet, with prices starting at $479,900. These are not sprawling estates. The pitch, stated plainly on their own materials, is low-maintenance living in a prime spot, houses sized for people who want a mountain view and a short walk to dinner more than they want a lawn to mow.

What they build

The homes come with two-car garages and a care-free maintenance package, which is the part that does the heavy lifting for a lot of buyers here, the ones trading a bigger yard elsewhere for a smaller list of weekend chores. Both the townhomes and the single-family houses are built to the same efficiency standards Southern Development leans on across its work: they are Pearl Certified and carry the builder's EcoSmart designation, third-party and in-house marks that speak to insulation, systems, and energy performance rather than square footage.

If you want to see the range before you set foot in the model, the builder keeps separate pages for the townhomes and the single-family homes, plus a community map and a list of included features. But the model home is the honest way to do it. Photos flatten a floor plan; standing in one does not.

The neighborhood around it

Old Trail Village is the reason a lot of people end up on Golf Drive in the first place, and Southern Development is candid that it is selling the setting as much as the houses. The community wraps a golf course, a pool, a coffee shop, an ACAC gym, and a handful of restaurants, with walking and nature trails threading through the greenspace between them. There are community gardens, a playground, a community center, and fiberoptic internet available to the houses. The daily rhythm the builder describes is a modest one and probably an accurate one for the people who live here: coffee in the morning, a workout at ACAC, an evening stroll out to dinner, the mountains doing the work in the background.

Families tend to ask about schools first, and Old Trail's answer is unusually tidy. Brownsville Elementary, Henley Middle, and Western Albemarle High all sit just outside the main entrance, close enough that the commute to any of the three is measured in minutes. The community also has easy access to Interstate 64, which puts Charlottesville roughly twelve miles east, out US-250.

Before you go

This is a model home, not a walk-in shop, so the hours run on a builder's schedule and appointments are recommended. The office is open Monday from noon to 5, Tuesday through Sunday from 10 to 5, and closed Thursday and Friday. If you are coming from Charlottesville, the route is straightforward: head west on US-250 for about twelve miles, turn right onto Old Trail Drive at the village entrance, follow it just under a mile, then turn left onto Golf Drive and stay on it until 5420 comes up on your right.

You can reach the sales office at (434) 595-4328, and the model home and community details live at southern-development.com. The address, for the GPS and the record, is 5420 Golf Dr, Crozet, VA 22932.

More trades & home services in Crozet

Trades & Home Services

Advantage Home Contracting

Home-services contractor in the Crozet area.

Trades & Home Services

Airflow Systems Inc.

Home-services contractor in the Crozet area.

Trades & Home Services

Albemarle Heating & Air

Home-services contractor in the Crozet area.

Trades & Home Services

Alpha and Omega Home Improvement Contracting, LLC

Home-services contractor in the Crozet area.

← Back to the Crozet business directory