Forty-five years after Vero Beach architect and community planner Clem Schaub first put pencil to drawing paper, 40 years after the first homes were built, the small island enclave known as Baytree stands out as an example of how superior design and sensitivity to nature can empower human happiness.
“Baytree is a joyful place,” says HOA board vice president Katharine Papadopoulos.
She and other residents express their love for the community in almost mystical terms and are full of stories about the instant attraction they felt for it.
Papadopoulos and her husband went to an open house in Baytree in 2009 and somehow ended up buying the house next door as a vacation home the same day, even though it wasn’t listed for sale, because it called to her so strongly.
Board president Joann Goldstein and her husband went house hunting with Vero Beach friends they were visiting and put in an offer on a Baytree home the first time they saw the community.
“We were asking ourselves what was wrong with us to act so impulsively as we left that day,” Goldstein says with a smile. “That deal ended up falling through, but three years later when I retired from the New York comptroller’s office in 2012 we bought our home here and have loved it ever since.”
Greg Forrer, a former outdoor writer for the Palm Beach Post and corporate communications professional, is a two-time cancer survivor. He told Vero Beach 32963 he attributes feeling better today “physically, mentally and spiritually” than he has in many years, in part, to the beneficent influence of what he calls “the enchanted forest” on the west side of community, where he has lived for the past 12 years.
“We have approximately 300 old coastal oaks and something like 1,000 palm trees that are very well cared for by our arborist,” he says.
Those oaks, palms and assorted bay trees have been the guiding light of the community since its conception.
“It is our absolute commitment to preserve as many of the trees on the property as we can,” Schaub said in 1982, when plans for the community were revealed. “With our cluster concept, we can shift the site of an entire cluster [of homes], or one villa within the cluster. We will do this whenever it endangers any of the extremely valuable trees.”
Baytree was developed by Schaub’s father and brother – Richard Schaub and Richard Schaub jr. – who employed him to design the community and homes within it.
The 108 condos and villas are residential wonderlands inside but minimalist on the outside, which has enabled them to age gracefully, unlike much architecture from the 1980s. Clem Schaub, who went on to become one of Vero’s most notable architects, says his style is “tropical,” a term that encompasses a range of looks from the traditional British West Indies style often seen on the island to Tropical Modernism.
The Baytree villas, which are built around large interior courtyards that make the homes permeable to nature, are precursors of the now wildly popular Tropical Modern style.
“I studied architecture in New Orleans and apprenticed in the Old City of San Juan where courtyards are extensively utilized, as they are around the globe in hot climates,” Schaub says. “Courtyards allow for outdoor privacy, light from numerous orientations and cross ventilation.
“In tropical architecture, you can’t really draw the line between inside and outside. Whatever is on the outside has to speak to the inside. So, the outside becomes the most important room in the house. It needs the same attention. The inside and outside come out as a finished product as one thought.”
Schaub’s Baytree residences are never more than one room thick and interior walls facing the private courtyards are mostly floor to ceiling glass, with magical touches emphasizing the interpenetration of the built and natural worlds.
“One of the floor plans [shows] a glass enclosed hallway . . . and a fountain within the atrium with a waterway leading under the hallway to a low waterfall that spills into the swimming pool [in the courtyard],” a 1982 article reported.
“I walked through those homes when they were built 40 years ago, and I was very impressed,” says well-known island developer Bob McNally. “There are some very cool floor plans in there, and he was one of the first to do cathedral ceilings.”
“There is nothing else like it,” says Douglas Elliman broker associate Sally Daley. “Not just in Vero, but anywhere on the Florida coast. It has real panache.”
Living on the west side of the community is like living in a highly amenitized forest, while the east side, where condos and villas are arrayed along more than 1,000 feet of bright Atlantic beachfront, offers the lifestyle of an ocean resort.
The community, which is in the midst of a $3.8-million set of upgrades, has a full-featured clubhouse, four Har-Tru tennis courts attended by a tennis pro and four swimming pools, including one that extends promontory-like over the beach.
‘The architecture is minimalistic, Mediterranean, very similar to southern Europe, whether it is Greece or Southern Italy,” says Papadopoulos, who splits her time between Washington D.C., Athens and a 4,000-square-foot villa on the east side of Baytree that mostly presents unadorned white walls to the world. “You have no idea what is going on behind the walls. But then you walk into these big, beautiful courtyards or cruise ship views of the ocean.
“My daughter Rose grew up with the sea turtles, going out in the early morning and watching countless little ones hatch and enter the ocean.”
“Baytree is the best of both worlds,” says Rose Papadopoulos, a St. Edward’s graduate who began her studies at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University last month. “The west side in the enchanted forest where I rode my bike and climbed trees while I was growing up and the east side is this ocean oasis.”
Baytree’s design and architecture garnered Schaub a prestigious Grand Award from the National Association of Homebuilders in 1985, as the community opened to early residents – and it has been a worthwhile investment for those buyers.
Preconstruction pricing for villas started at $165,000 in 1984; in 2023 and 2024, the average sales price for a home in the community was over a million dollars, and a 3,958-square-foot, 3-bedroom, 4-bath home went for $2.2 million in June.
But it is the lives that have been and are being lived in Indian River Shores’ northmost community that are the best testament to the power and perseverance of the architect’s vision.
“I can’t imagine my life without this community,” said Rose Papadopoulos, whose family made Baytree their primary home during the early days of the pandemic, so she could attend St. Ed’s while Washington D.C. schools remained closed. “This has always felt more like a home to me than any place else we have very lived.”
A state department career will likely take her to far flung locales, but she says she will always feel Vero Beach in the background, a source of emotional comfort and familiar place she can return to.
“When we moved here for her sophomore, junior and senior years, it turned out to be the best thing we have done, but I wasn’t sure at first I could make it fulltime in quiet little Vero Beach,” says Katharine Papadopoulos. “I grew up in Chicago and have lived in DC and Athens and was used to big-city life. Now that Rose is starting at Georgetown and we will be there much more, I don’t know how I am going to make it being in DC instead of Vero Beach, and especially Baytree.”
“I love Baytree,” says Forrer, who calls it his “clean, well-lighted place,” after the title of a Hemingway story that touches on how a pleasant environment can alleviate loneliness and emotional pain.
“I can’t really describe it except to say that it is a magical place,” says Papadopoulos. “It is such a warm, family-like community and there is a wonderful cast of characters, people from many walks of life who care about each other very much.
“You wouldn’t believe how many people have come by to see Rose before she heads off to college, to give her gifts of offer words [of encouragement and advice].”
Asked what she likes best about Vero Beach, Goldstein doesn’t say the art museum, Riverside Theatre or The Tides restaurant. “I like being home [in Baytree],” she says. “We have such great neighbors, and it is such a wonderful place to be.”
Photos by Joshua Kodis
