Case Study: Santa Rosa Beach, FL

Watercrest Santa Rosa Beach is a 107-unit, 92,000-square-foot luxury senior living facility that offers resort-style service and amenities for residents. Located along Northwest Florida’s prominent Emerald Coast, seniors have access to virtually unlimited natural beauty and white sand beaches.

The Watercrest Senior Living Group operates multiple residential communities in the southeastern United States, all providing top-level care tailored to individual patient preferences with a focus on wellness and maintaining an engaging, active lifestyle.

The latest Watercrest development is in Santa Rosa Beach, a coastal community that required the new structure possess a durable, long-lasting exterior. In search for the right cladding product, one that would ultimately reduce ongoing maintenance, a business acquaintance shared Everlast® advanced composite siding with architect Ryan Lee.

“Our biggest requirement for the Watercrest Santa Rosa Beach location was to significantly reduce costs with a product that would help our long-term maintenance,” said Ryan Lee of LifeBUILT Architecture, the architect of record for the Watercrest projects. “The owners had not heard of Everlast siding, but on paper, it was a product that seemed to be the perfect fit.”

Lee and the ownership group ended up choosing Everlast horizontal lap siding in the 7” plank on the first and second floors. The third floor is clad in Everlast Board & Batten, a vertical siding that features an 11” reveal and a generous 2”- wide integrated batten. For both styles, they selected Everlast siding’s classic Natural White color.

Maintenance of the Watercrest communities was a costly endeavor in the past, and owners were searching for a way to eliminate this challenge at the Santa Rosa Beach location.

“For the Watercrest communities, Santa Rosa Beach was the location where Everlast came into play for us,” added Lee. “We had a skeleton of the overall design but wanted to incorporate a viable exterior solution to help out operations in the long-term. Financially, Everlast made more sense than the fiber cement product we were using on the other communities. It also delivered low maintenance and met the wind load characteristics necessary for the area.”

To quantify the cost savings, the project team performed a cost analysis for siding at one of the existing Watercrest communities in South Carolina. The team’s analysis showed that Everlast siding actually had a slightly reduced initial cost to the fiber cement siding but had a secondary advantage of not needing to be painted initially nor repainted every four to five years.

“Part of the analysis was to look at future expenditures of the community and we recognized that repainting would be a significant expense in a coastal environment,” Lee explained. “This meant that owners would need to recoup that money just to perform basic maintenance. By choosing Everlast siding, those costs are eliminated. This reduced long-term expense can allow the community to bring in more nurses or caregivers to ultimately deliver better care for its senior residents.”

In addition, because Santa Rosa Beach is situated along the Gulf of Mexico, the area’s coastal climate demanded that the new Watercrest community have a high-performance, durable exterior. The siding selected needed to be able to withstand constant exposure to the sun, salt, and moisture from heavy Florida rains.

Everlast siding was an ideal solution as it is engineered to provide superior fade and weather resistance. It consists of a thick and solid composite substrate incorporating C CORE® material technology and polymer resins. Moreover, all Everlast colors feature a UV-stable acrylic capstock that allows the product to maintain a beautiful appearance even after decades of exposure to sun and weather. “Everlast siding delivers the low maintenance that owners love but with the beauty that you get with wood or fiber cement. Fortunately, it possesses durability too,” Lee added. “We think it is going to be a huge win for the long-term management of the building.”

Watercrest Santa Rosa Beach officially opened in February 2021.

The project team included architect LifeBUILT Architecture; general contractor EMJ Construction; real estate developer The St. Joe Company; and Watercrest Senior Living Group.