The Oaks

A 25,000 square foot clubhouse, a full tennis complex, a spa, spin and Pilates studios and a twenty-five yard pool. All of it belongs to the 469 houses here rather than to a membership, so there is nothing to buy into and no annual dues beyond the association fee.

The clubhouse is Santa Barbara in style and holds a restaurant and bar, card and meeting rooms, and the fitness floor with its studios. All of it is for residents and their guests; nobody reaches the gate without being one or the other. The tennis complex runs on lighted HydroGrid courts with teaching professionals on staff, and pickleball keeps its own space beside them.

The Houses

There are 469 estate homes across about 282 acres, developed from 2000 through the middle of that decade and now sold out, so everything trades as resale. The lots sold across those years with the largest single wave in 2005. The architecture runs from Mizner Mediterranean through transitional to modern, and the houses run from roughly 3,000 square feet to well over 7,000.

The lots run from about a sixth of an acre to four fifths, with the middle of the range close to a quarter, so the ground under two houses of the same size can differ by a factor of four. Which named section a house sits in, and which lot, are the questions that set value here.

What the Clubhouse Actually Holds

The fitness floor carries spin and Pilates studios rather than a room of machines, and the spa is full-service rather than a treatment room borrowed from the locker area. The restaurant and bar, the card rooms and the meeting rooms take the hours that are not athletic.

Outside it, the tennis complex runs on lighted HydroGrid courts, which hold their moisture from below and play consistently through a Florida summer in a way a dry hard court does not.

Behind the Gate

The entrance is on the north side of Clint Moore Road between Lyons Road and State Road 7, behind a manned gate.

The land itself is the other half of it. Of the 282 acres, only about 131 sit under the houses. The other 150, more than half the property, are lakes, recreation ground and the planting between the streets, which is why the place reads as open rather than packed.

That balance is set at the plat rather than by landscaping, so it does not change. No future building can take it back, and it is the part of a community of this age that a buyer cannot get anywhere newer at the same price.

The houses sit in several named sections, and they are not interchangeable. Each was built out across its own stretch of years, and that is what moves a section along the line from Mizner Mediterranean to modern, so the section name tells you roughly which era of house to expect before the address does.

Where The Oaks Sits

Town Center at Boca Raton is about six and a half miles south and Delray Marketplace a little over four miles north. Downtown Delray is about eleven miles east, with the beach a little further. Florida's Turnpike is a short run east, which puts both airports within a straightforward drive.