Interior designer in Palm City, Florida

Several of Palm City's club communities are built around the water. Harbour Ridge Yacht & Country Club has about two miles of St. Lucie River frontage, a 98-slip marina and two golf courses, with homes and villas in 28 villages. Piper's Landing places 302 residences on more than 600 acres around a golf course and a 49-slip marina basin with access to the ocean. Palm Cove Golf & Yacht Club is a gated neighborhood on protected St. Lucie River water, about seven nautical miles from the inlet.

In these communities the view organizes the house, whether it is river, marina or fairway. We plan layouts that open the main rooms to it, choose finishes and fabrics that hold up to salt air and strong sun, and present each room in 3D so decisions can be made from anywhere.

• Layouts that turn the main rooms toward the river, marina or fairway
• Storage for boating, fishing and golf gear in garages and mudrooms
• Finishes, fabrics and hardware selected for salt air and sun
• Drawings and finish lists ready for association review

Many of Palm City's golf and club neighborhoods, among them Evergreen, Crane Creek, Monarch Country Club, Cobblestone and Hammock Creek, took shape between the late 1970s and the early 2000s. Houses from those years often have formal living and dining rooms that see little use, kitchens closed off from the family room, and finishes ready for a refresh.

We redesign these houses around how their owners live now: opening the kitchen to the family room, reworking the primary suite, and bringing the lanai and pool into the plan. Palm City is unincorporated, so Martin County issues the permits, but the county says it does not enforce HOA or POA bylaws. Association approval is a separate step, and we prepare drawings that serve both.

Building continued into newer enclaves such as Copperleaf and Canopy Creek, built from the late 2000s and through the 2010s. Newfield, a master-planned community of more than 3,800 acres by Mattamy Homes, keeps about 70 percent of its land as open space and is planned as nine villages around a walkable Downtown Newfield and a 170-acre working farm, with single-family homes, villas and townhomes.

In houses as recent as those in Copperleaf and Canopy Creek, walls rarely need to move; lighting, window treatments, built-ins and furniture can change how the rooms feel and work. In Newfield the planning can start earlier, from the builder's plans, so the interior is designed before the keys arrive.

Old Palm City, around Mapp Road near the St. Lucie River, has been one of Martin County's six community redevelopment areas since 2002. The county rebuilt Mapp Road as a complete street with wide sidewalks, bike lanes, decorative streetlights and on-street parking, and its Ripple stormwater and public art project reconnects the neighborhood with the river at four sites along SW 28th and 29th Streets.

Businesses in the redevelopment area follow the county's CRA architectural design standards when they build or renovate, and we design offices, shops and restaurants to fit them, along with the branding and signage that face the street. For houses near the water built before current flood rules, the county adds up improvement costs over five years when it applies the 50 percent rule, which shapes how a renovation is phased.