Fort Myers Beach cottages being rebuilt, will start at $2.6M

A few days after Hurricane Ian hit Florida in 2022, the owners of the Cottages of Paradise Point on Fort Myers Beach posted on the property’s website that they wouldn’t rebuild.

People are safe, Dennis and Lisa Greenspon wrote on Oct. 4, 2022, but the community of rental cottages “is no more. It has been destroyed.”

“We will miss all the close friendships that we have formed over the past 20 years,” the couple wrote in the blog post. “We will not be rebuilding. Cottages of Paradise Point is now a beautiful, cherished memory.”

Just under four years later, the Cottages of Paradise Point on Estero Boulevard is making a comeback.

Construction began last week on the first new cottage to be built on the Greenspons' property and at least two more are expected to begin construction this year.

But the new Cottages of Paradise Point that’s rising in the aftermath of Ian is far different than what stood before.

While the property in its previous iteration was a rental community of old-world Florida cottages, the new homes have a modern bent and will be listed for sale, with prices starting at $2.6 million.

“They were quite successful with those rentals,” Marvin Homes President Richard Durling says of Dennis and Lisa Greenspon, “but at this point in their lives, they're thinking they just want to rebuild them and sell them. And then whoever buys them can rent them.”

The first cottage is 2,143 square feet and the ones to follow include a 3,607-square-foot residence with a pool beneath the house and a 2,053-square-foot house near beach access.

Durling, whose Fort Myers company has been hired to build the cottages, says there are 12 lots in all, with three rows of four lots each that run from Estero Boulevard to the gulf. The Greenspons own eight of the lots, buying the first one in 2001.

The change to the Cottages of Paradise Point is emblematic of what is happening along Fort Myers Beach in the aftermath of Ian in September 2022, with the old-style, quaint Florida beach community being transformed into something more modern — and pricier.

Some of that change is due to necessity.

The cottages wiped out during Ian were built in the 1960s on wood piling and very low to the ground. Those were acceptable methods then but not as resilient as modern standards, Durling says.  

What’s replacing those cottages is going to be 15 feet above the ground, built on concrete pilings and engineered to withstand 160-mile-an-hour winds. The houses will have hurricane impact windows and doors and metal roofs.

But in a nod to the spirit of the Fort Myers Beach, the homes will be brightly colored and designed to keep each unique, unlike track housing, During says.

“The look and the feel we wanted to convey is that it is a beach home, a beach community, similar to what was there, but, obviously, not the same construction.”

As for the four remaining lots on Cottages of Paradise Point property, Marvin Homes has already constructed a new house for the owner of one. And another house is under construction with a different contractor. The remaining two are vacant.