Long Lake Estates

Here the lots run an acre and up. A hundred and eighteen of the hundred and twenty-five are an acre or more, the middle of the range is just over an acre, and the lawn keeps going beside the house as well as behind it.

The Water Is Most of the Point

The community is named for its lakes and the name is earned. Nearly fifty acres of the 206 are water, close to a quarter of the whole property. The lakes run through the middle as a chain of long shorelines, with the houses set out along peninsulas that push into them.

About half the lots front that water. Twenty-six of them carry more than two hundred feet of shoreline and the longest run past four hundred feet. At that length the far edge of the property is water. Mature banyans and heavy tropical planting run across the peninsulas, which is why the water reads as landscape rather than as drainage.

Behind a lakefront house the mown lawn runs to the bank, and the bank is the only visible seam between the yard and the water beyond it. Walk out into one of these lots and the house begins to recede while the rear boundary is still ahead of you.

A Streetscape Still Being Written

The lots here sold between 1978 and 1985, and eighty-six of the hundred and twenty-five went in the first three years, so the community was laid out quickly and has been changing one property at a time ever since. Some houses have been comprehensively renovated. Others were taken down and rebuilt from the ground up, which happens most often on the lakefront lots.

The result is a street where an established estate stands at one address and a contemporary rebuild occupies the next. Every house is custom, so the architecture runs from Mediterranean and Old World detail through to the plainly modern. That variety is the character of the place rather than a flaw in it, and it follows directly from acre lots that let each owner build to their own plan without pressing against a boundary.

For a buyer it also means two listings of the same size can be entirely different purchases. The land is the constant. Everything on it is not.

The Setting

The entrance is on the south side of Clint Moore Road, a third of a mile west of Florida's Turnpike, and the drive in crosses the lake before it reaches the first house. A guardhouse stands at the far side of that crossing, manned around the clock. Le Rivage sits across the way and The Oaks is nearby.

There is no clubhouse here and no shared recreation ground. Beyond the roads, the gate and the lakes, the association holds nothing that residents pay to keep up, and there is no membership of any kind attached to owning here.

Town Center at Boca Raton is about five and a half miles east. Mizner Park and downtown Boca are about nine and a half, and the beach closer to eleven. The Turnpike is immediately at hand, which makes both airports straightforward. Life here centers on the individual property rather than on a shared calendar, and with an acre or more under each house, most of what a household would drive to elsewhere fits behind the gate of the lot itself.