Custom home builder in St. James, North Carolina, among the fairways and the pines.

Here's what St. James decides for your lot.

We build new homes and remodel existing ones in St. James, from our home base in Southport.

• A remodel that changes the footprint goes through both reviews, as a new house does.
• Once the association approves a plan, it has twelve months to be built.
• The height cap is 40 feet in most house districts, and 35 feet in R-10.

At a glance

County

Brunswick County

Zoning code

The town's own Unified Development Ordinance (UDO)

Who reviews

Property owners' association first, then the town; Brunswick County issues the building permit

Design wind speed

150 mph townwide (2018 NC Residential Code)

Drive from Southport

About 20 minutes and 8 miles on NC 211 (Southport-Supply Road)

Residential Contractor License #109520 · Member, Brunswick County Home Builders Association

Design review first, then the town's permit review

Jurisdiction

Town of St. James: an incorporated municipality that regulates land use under its own Unified Development Ordinance

Adopted code

St. James UDO, Article 7 residential districts (ordinance passed 2-3-2021); St. James Code Chapter 150, Flood Damage Prevention (Ord. 2018-03, passed 7-2-2018)

Permit authority

Zoning and floodplain-development permits: Town of St. James, Town Manager as Floodplain Administrator under § 150.25; building permit and certificate of occupancy: Brunswick County (Secs. 4.12.1 and 4.12.2)

Flood-map source

FEMA Flood Insurance Rate Map and the Flood Insurance Study for Brunswick County, adopted by reference in the town code (§ 150.06); read through the NC Flood Risk Information System

Ultimate design wind speed

150 mph ultimate (2018 NC Residential Code, Table R301.2(4), note c); the whole town sits on the coastal side of the county's US 17 line, and only exposure category varies lot by lot

A house plan inside the gates goes through two reviews, always in the same order. The property owners' association reviews it first, and the town's own permits come next.

The association's architectural design guidelines were revised on September 16, 2025. Its design-review committee, which the guidelines call the ACC, reads site, exterior-building, and landscaping plans before construction starts. An approved plan has twelve months to be built. The covenants fix the order of the two reviews, whatever either one is likely to decide.

Only after that association review can the town's permit process begin. St. James runs its own Unified Development Ordinance, separate from the Brunswick County UDO that covers unincorporated places such as Winnabow. The current residential districts sit in Article 7, adopted February 3, 2021. Floodplain development follows the town's own Chapter 150, passed July 2, 2018. That chapter names the Town Manager as the Floodplain Administrator. The administrator's job is to run the chapter and keep the town in compliance with the National Flood Insurance Program. The building permit comes last, from Brunswick County, once the town approves the zoning permit (Sec. 4.12.1).

Some St. James lots sit inside a mapped Special Flood Hazard Area where base flood elevation data is available. There, the town sets a floor for new construction and for any substantial improvement. A substantial improvement is work on an existing house, in any one-year period, that costs at least half the building's market value. The reference level, including any basement, has to sit at or above the regulatory flood protection elevation. The code defines that elevation as the base flood elevation plus freeboard. The base flood elevation is the height FEMA sets for the flood with a 1 percent chance in any year. Freeboard is the extra height the town adds above it. The Floodplain Administrator confirms the exact number of feet of freeboard for a given parcel. That figure is worth having before a finish-floor height gets drawn.

A pond or lake lot adds one more review to plan for: stormwater. The town's planning office says which office signs the stormwater plan for a lot that drains to a community pond.

New construction in St. James fills in a community that's mostly built.

R-20 district

20,000 sq ft minimum lot; 50 ft front, 45 ft rear, 15 ft side setbacks; 40 ft height cap; § 7.4

R-15 district

15,000 sq ft minimum lot; 40 ft front, 35 ft rear, 10 ft side setbacks; 40 ft height cap; § 7.5

R-10 district

10,000 sq ft minimum lot; 30 ft front, 25 ft rear, 10 ft side setbacks; 35 ft height cap; § 7.6

SBR-6000 district

6,000 sq ft minimum lot; setbacks scaled to housing type, 12–20 ft front and 10–15 ft rear; 40 ft height cap; minimum 10-acre development; § 7.8

New homes in St. James, district by district

New construction in St. James Plantation means building on one of the lots still open inside a largely built-out community. That lot may have come off the original plat or come back through resale. The zoning district sets the numeric envelope. The community's design guidelines set the aesthetic one. What the site read produces is what makes the two work together. All four of the town's standard single-family districts are written around public water and sewer service. That retires a set of well-and-septic questions an inland Brunswick County lot outside the gates would still be asking.

The figures in the table above are set district by district. A lot zoned R-20 and a smaller interior lot zoned R-10 answer to different numbers, including a different height ceiling: 40 feet against 35. Which district covers a specific parcel gets confirmed with the town before it shapes a design. One provision in R-20, R-15, and R-10 is worth reading closely on this ground. The rear setback can be cut in half where the rear yard does not abut another residential use. Whether a fairway or a stormwater pond meets that condition on a particular lot is the town's call. The answer decides whether the house gets pushed forward on its lot or can sit back and face the view the lot was bought for.

Renovating a first-generation St. James house

A meaningful share of the housing stock inside the gates now dates to the community's first two decades. Much of it was built before current airtightness thinking existed, and often before the design guidelines' present material standards were in place. Renovating an original St. James house usually means moving it toward current performance. That means a tighter envelope, a coordinated moisture strategy, and mechanical equipment sized to the house's current use. It also means keeping the architectural character the community's review expects an existing house to hold. Any renovation that changes a structure's footprint goes back through both reviews the same way new construction does: association first, then the town.

An ADU in St. James has to clear two sets of rules.

The town's table of uses (Sec. 7.16) lists an accessory dwelling unit as a special use in R-20, R-15 and R-10. It takes a special use permit from the Town Council after an evidentiary hearing, on the conditions in Sec. 8.2. The covenants layer their own restrictions on top of whatever the code allows. That is why testing an accessory dwelling for feasibility inside the gates means reading both documents together. The limits under Sec. 8.2 run like this.

• One accessory dwelling unit per lot with a principal dwelling, sharing its mailing address, mailbox, and driveway. It gets its own driveway only off a different street or a rear alley.
• Capped at two bedrooms and 800 square feet of floor area. Barred on lots that already carry a duplex, multi-family dwelling, or family care home. Never subdivided from the main lot.
• Sited behind the principal house and at least 10 feet from it, matching its architectural style, materials, and roof form.
• Counted toward the lot's maximum impervious surface coverage, a lot-wide limit it shares with the principal dwelling. The town sets that limit at the state's or Brunswick County's impervious standard, whichever is more restrictive at the time of the permit (Sec. 2.15).

A golf-course or pond-lot ADU also raises the property owners' association's own architectural review, on top of the town's ordinance. Whether a specific St. James lot can realistically support an accessory unit is a question for the planning office and the association together. That question comes before the unit becomes a line on a drawing.

St. James Plantation became the Town of St. James in 1999.

St. James sits off NC 211 behind its own gates, a nine-square-mile town that became a municipality in 1999.

The Town of St. James incorporated on July 1, 1999. It runs a council-manager government. Five council members are elected at-large to staggered four-year terms. The council chooses the mayor and mayor pro tem from among its own members. Residents began pursuing incorporation in 1997, partly for self-governance and partly to guard against annexation by neighboring towns. By the town's own account, it covers 9.2 square miles, and 2,450 acres of that sit in conservancy.

It is an unusual founding for a Brunswick County community. Other places across the rest of Brunswick County grew out of fishing villages, river crossings, and beach roads. St. James grew out of a master-planned golf community along NC 211 that eventually asked to govern itself. The name is older than the golf. The property owners' association's own history traces it to the colonial parish of St. James. When the Cape Fear area was split in two around 1740, that parish was the eastern half.

The town's own materials project a long-range population of about 10,000 residents at full build-out. That projection describes the community's eventual size, and it is distinct from a current census figure. A separate estimate from the property owners' association puts today's residents closer to 7,000. The two figures answer different questions, but they agree on scale. St. James is a large, still-developing planned community with the legal shape of a small town. It has private roads, a gate, and a homeowners' governance layer that most Brunswick County towns do not carry.

The inventory behind the gate, in the town's and the developer's own counts:

• Four golf clubs, by the developer's count: the Founders Club, the Members Club, the Players Club, and the Reserve Club. They spread across the town, with 81 holes in total.
• A marina on the Intracoastal Waterway, reported at about 15 acres near mile marker 315. It has wet slips and dry-stack storage, held under its own condominium association.
• Two public parks the town names in its own materials: Waterway Park and Woodlands Park. A network of walking and biking trails connects the sections.
• A property owners' association and its design-review committee, layered over the town's zoning. That governance comes attached to the deed and binds every buyer.

A St. James lot is one of four kinds. It is a golf-course lot, a pond lot, a wooded interior lot, or a lot on the waterway or the marina basin. All four are a long way from the barrier-island lots down the county coast. Each kind is a different design problem before a single ordinance is opened. Naming which one applies is the first step on a St. James project.

St. James carries one wind number. The ground still varies lot to lot.

Every house in Brunswick County answers to Table R301.2(4) of the 2018 NC Residential Code. That table splits the county's ultimate design wind speed at US 17: 140 mph to the west, 150 mph to the east. St. James sits entirely on the coastal side of that line. The whole town, gate to marina, carries the 150 mph ultimate design wind speed that note c assigns to that ground. That number drives the structural design, and it is among the first entries a site analysis makes. It holds townwide. Reaching 150 mph also brings every St. James lot under NC Residential Code R4601.1. That section applies Chapter 46's coastal and flood construction rules in the 150 mph wind zone. It also applies them in coastal high hazard, ocean hazard, and regulatory floodplain areas. So a wooded interior lot or a fairway lot with no mapped flood exposure still meets Chapter 46, through the wind speed alone. It answers to the same chapter as a lot on the marina basin or the waterway.

What still changes from lot to lot is exposure, and here the pine canopy does most of the work. Take a golf-course or pond lot set back under mature pines. There, rooflines and tree cover break the wind on most sides. On those sides the lot reads as Exposure B, the code's term for ground with houses or trees close together. A lot on the marina basin, or fronting open water on the waterway, can see harsher exposure on the sides that face the water. Those sides come closer to an open-terrain or near-water condition. The same house plan does not answer both conditions. Which one applies to a given St. James lot is a site-specific call, made lot by lot.

The water table sits close to the surface

A high seasonal water table is typical of pine flatwoods across the coastal plain. In St. James, it shows up as the chain of stormwater lakes built along the fairways. Those lakes do double duty, as golf-course scenery and as the community's drainage system. A lot that backs to one of those lakes is a pond lot in the marketing sense and a drainage problem in the engineering sense. Both descriptions fit the same lot. The town's stormwater ordinance requires a 30-foot undisturbed buffer landward of the top of the channel bank. That buffer runs along perennial and intermittent streams, lakes, and other natural waterways (§ 50.015). It is a real constraint on the many St. James lots that front a pond. On a lot set back among the pines, it is no constraint at all.

Salt arrives here in a lighter dose than it does on the islands. St. James sits behind the barrier chain, up the waterway from the open ocean. The airborne chloride load is nothing like what a lot on Oak Island or Holden Beach absorbs every day. It is not zero, though. The marina basin and the lots directly on the waterway take the most of what moves up the Intracoastal. Connector and fastener selection on those parcels deserves the attention it would get on the open coast, even at a smaller dose. Planning for moisture before it appears makes the general argument. The St. James version is a pond-lot wall that has to dry against humidity off the lake and salt off the waterway at once.

A lot on the Intracoastal Waterway or the marina basin answers to the estuarine rules of CAMA, the Coastal Area Management Act. The ocean-hazard setbacks that shape beachfront lots elsewhere in the county do not reach this ground. Under 15A NCAC 07H .0209, an Estuarine Shoreline Area of Environmental Concern (AEC) runs 75 feet landward of normal high water. A narrower Public Trust Shoreline AEC runs 30 feet landward of normal high water, along public-trust waters. Which classification and buffer width apply to a specific St. James parcel is a DEQ determination, made lot by lot. Many golf-course and pond lots in the interior of the town sit well clear of any AEC.

The box is already drawn. We work out what fits inside it.

A St. James lot arrives with more of its envelope already decided than most lots do. The design guidelines set expectations for exterior materials, roof form, and color before a client ever calls a builder. The town's own zoning sets the numeric setbacks and height limit for whichever district the lot sits in. That changes which questions the site analysis has to answer. The analysis itself stays part of every St. James project.

With the footprint fixed, the open questions move from where a wall can stand to how the house sits inside the box. Which fairway or pond should the main rooms face, and which side of the house gets a hallway or a garage instead? Where do the mature pines the design guidelines want kept fall against the roof? How much afternoon shade do they buy a west-facing wall in July? Which way does the lot drain, toward the pond or toward the street? What does that mean for finish-floor height, before the flood map is even opened? Which sightlines toward the fairway or the water are worth spending glass on? Which ones look straight into a neighbor's roofline, at the side setback the district allows? Those are the questions the formal site analysis is built to answer. It is delivered as a written document, filed in the client's private project workspace as the first entry in the project record.

The covenants fix the footprint. The site analysis decides what happens inside it: orientation, shade, drainage, and where the glass goes.

The aesthetic rule and the performance target can pull in different directions.

The harder work is reconciliation. A design-review committee looks at roof pitch, material palette, and a consistent architectural character across the community. A continuous air barrier is outside its brief. The site analysis is where those two sets of requirements get argued out, before construction documents exist. The roofline has to satisfy the community's architectural character and still give a sealed, continuous roof deck the room it needs. The material palette, drawn from the approved list, still has to perform the way a coastal assembly should. Window and door selections have to clear both the guidelines' review and the airtightness target. Submitting a design that fails the community's own review costs a client months. Submitting one that passes review but quietly gives up on the performance standard costs them for the life of the house. The site analysis exists to make sure neither happens.

On a wooded interior lot, the same document settles narrower, common questions. How much of the lot's tree cover do the design guidelines expect kept? Where can a driveway, a pool, or a detached garage go without crossing into land the covenants protect? The town adds its own requirement on top of the covenants. Undeveloped property generally needs a tree clearing certificate before any clearing begins (UDO Article 10, Sec. 10.3). A lot already inside an approved single-family subdivision is typically exempt, unless the vegetation sits inside a required buffer. Any protected tree kept standing during construction gets a protective barricade sized to its trunk diameter (Sec. 10.4). On a pond or waterway lot, the site analysis settles a different question, view first. How far can the house push glass toward the water without losing the shade a St. James summer needs on the opposite wall? Either way, the deliverable is the same: a written analysis a client can read, keep, and hold the rest of the design against.

A pine canopy is shade today and debris in a storm.

A stand of mature pines is a design condition here. In a St. James summer, a west wall needs the shade it throws. The same pines shed limbs that turn into wind-borne debris. That happens in the very storms that raise the design wind loads a house on this ground has to withstand. Every Tropical Tides project pursues FORTIFIED Gold, the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety's highest tier. An independent evaluator checks the work, and the standard covers the roof, the walls, the openings, and the continuous load path connecting them. Under this canopy, much of the case for it is the debris and limbs a storm turns loose. That is the kind of load the FORTIFIED standard is built to resist. A tree the design guidelines want kept is an asset in July and a projectile in September. Both facts belong in the same drawing set.

FORTIFIED Gold's roof-deck sealing and opening-protection rules answer both problems with the same details. A sealed, taped roof deck stops the water a punctured shingle field would otherwise let through. The puncture might come from storm debris, or from a branch off a tree line the design guidelines asked the builder to keep standing. Impact-rated or shuttered openings do the same job at the walls. The choice is structural, which is why the standard requires a continuous, connected load path from roof to foundation.

A pine canopy is a design input twice over: shade the guidelines want kept, and limbs the roof has to survive.

Airtightness against pond-side humidity

The airtightness target is sub-1.0 ACH50 on every project. That means fewer than one air change per hour under a standardized blower-door test. The drawing only sets the target; a blower-door test before handover confirms the actual number. On a lot backing to a stormwater lake, or sitting near the marina basin, a loose envelope invites in humid air. That air has a short trip from open water to a cool interior surface. The trip is shorter than on a dry inland lot with no pond behind it. Holding the target means an air barrier tracked as one line through every window, penetration, and junction in those pine-shaded, pond-side walls. Then that line gets measured. Sub-1.0 ACH50 without stuffy interiors sets out how that tightness pairs with mechanical ventilation. Paired that way, a well-sealed house under this much shade does not go stale.

The mechanical system is what turns that shade and that pond into something a family feels day to day. That includes a house that sits closed up for weeks between visits. The starting point is equipment sized to the load. That means the real cooling load of a house shaded most of the day by mature pines, drawing humid air off an adjacent stormwater lake. Sometimes the calculation shows the latent load (the moisture to pull from the air) outrunning what the cooling equipment alone removes. Then dedicated dehumidification carries the difference. That keeps a closed-up house from sitting at a comfortable temperature in damp air. FORTIFIED Gold is pursued on every Tropical Tides project, and an independent evaluator checks the work. Sub-1.0 ACH50 stays a design target until the blower door on a specific St. James house reports the number.

We handle the gate and the paperwork.

A gated community adds a layer a public street doesn't have: the gate itself. Contractors, inspectors, and delivery vehicles all pass through security that St. James controls. We get the construction partner registered for that access: the passes, the vehicle list, and a schedule gate staff can see. That is part of directing the build, since a client isn't always on site to manage it day to day.

The permits follow the order the covenants and the code both set. The property owners' association's design-review committee goes first. Next come the town's zoning permit and floodplain review, at the town offices, 4140A Southport-Supply Road. Brunswick County's building permit comes last. The town's UDO requires its zoning approval before the application to the county goes in (Sec. 4.12.1). An unincorporated address, like Winnabow, skips the town step, since the county zones and permits it directly. Starting a project inside the gates means working that sequence from the first site visit forward.

Tropical Tides is based in Southport, about 20 minutes away on NC 211. The practice holds North Carolina Residential Contractor License #109520 and belongs to the Brunswick County Home Builders Association. The number is 910-946-5512. Tropical Tides designs custom homes and directs a vetted construction partner through the build. Every decision is kept in the client's private project workspace.

Every named section answers to the same town code.

St. James Plantation is a set of named sections, built out over more than two decades, each with its own lot character. The names come from developer and real-estate marketing, and no official town map stands behind them. A section's name, its inventory, and which parcels are still buildable are all worth confirming with a broker or the property owners' association. That check comes before a design assumes any of it. The broad pattern, though, holds well enough to describe.

• The Reserve, named for its own golf club.
• Woodlands, with more wooded interior lots than pond frontage.
• Seaside, an inland section despite the name. St. James fronts the Intracoastal Waterway, so no section inside the gates has an oceanfront lot. The community's beach club sits across the water on Oak Island.
• James Marina Village, the cluster of home sites nearest the marina basin on the waterway. CAMA's estuarine framework is most likely to touch a parcel there.

What ties the sections together is the governance and the ground, more than any shared address. Every section has the same design-review committee and the same town code. Every section also sits on the same pine-flatwoods soil and pond system, whichever club or clubhouse it's named for. A wooded Woodlands lot and a fairway lot in the Reserve are still zoned under one of the same four residential districts. Both are still subject to the same association review, and both are still worth the same site analysis before either one is designed.

St. James also sits inside a wider cluster of Brunswick County communities the practice works across. Each comparison sharpens what makes St. James distinct. Southport, where the practice is based, is a small river town on a compact in-town grid. It has none of the gate, the covenants, or the private roads. Oak Island and Holden Beach are barrier islands. They carry genuine oceanfront exposure and the CAMA ocean-hazard setbacks that a golf-course or pond lot inside St. James will never meet. Winnabow, to the north, is unincorporated land governed by the Brunswick County UDO. Those differences are design inputs. A client weighing a St. James lot against one of the others is choosing between different building problems.