Les Jardins

Most communities are subdivided and then landscaped. Les Jardins was landscaped and then subdivided.

Before a house went up, the whole 105 acres was drawn as one continuous landscape by The SWA Group, described at the time as one of the country's leading planning and landscape design firms. Streets and homesites were placed inside that composition rather than the planting being fitted around a street grid afterwards. More than 18 acres of it are parks and recreation ground, and once the streets and the planted verges between them are counted with it, better than a third of Les Jardins is ground that belongs to no single house.

The plan was written in view ratios. The sales material of 1986 set the target at about 75 percent of the residences not backing onto another house, which was the intention rather than a survey of what stands now. The intention is still legible from the street, in the way the green threads between the houses instead of gathering at one end of the property.

Les Jardins means the gardens. Here the name refers to planting that existed on paper before any of the houses did.

Five Parks, Woven Through the Community

The outdoor recreation was deliberately scattered rather than centralized. Five separate parks sit across the community instead of one large green at its middle, placed, in the plan's own words, to maximize space and views, and a jogging and fitness trail links them into a continuous route. Walking it takes you from a park to a residential street and back into planting as another piece of the original layout comes into view.

At the clubhouse the day moves between indoors and out. The patio faces two lighted tennis courts, the pool occupies its own part of the recreation ground, and inside are an exercise room and a kitchen. The community is bordered by perimeter walls and waterways, with a gate manned twenty-four hours a day and security patrolling inside it.

A Custom Community, Built Inside One Drawing

AmeriFirst Development Corporation conceived Les Jardins as custom estate residences and then handed construction to a group of area builders rather than to a single production builder, with the shared land plan supplying the common order. Vantage Enterprises, Regency Homes and Victor Frankel were among them.

That decision is why no two houses here look alike. The lots sold between 1985 and 1992, and four of those eight years carried ninety-nine of them, so the whole community went up quickly and inside one drawing.

A hundred and eighteen houses stand today. They sit on ground running from about 17,700 square feet to more than 51,000, with the middle of the range close to 24,000, a little over half an acre.

Where Les Jardins Sits

The entrance is on the east side of St. Andrews Boulevard, about a mile and a half north of Glades Road. Town Center at Boca Raton is under two miles south. Mizner Park and downtown Boca are about six miles southeast, and the beach about seven. Interstate 95 and Yamato Road put the rest of South Florida within reach.

For a community with this much green inside its walls, that is a central address. The parks are not a borrowed view of somebody else's land. They are part of the property, and they were there first.