Who developed Berry Farms in Franklin?

Berry Farms was developed by Boyle Investment Company, a Memphis-based real estate firm with a strong presence in Greater Nashville commercial real estate. Construction began in the late 2000s. Berry Farms is one of the few large Franklin master plans developed by an outfit other than Southern Land Company, which built Westhaven, Laurelbrooke, McEwen, and Carronbridge. The 602-acre community sits on land that has been continuously owned by the Berry family since Colonel "Buck" Martin returned from Andrew Jackson's War of 1812 staff and built his home, Rural Plains, on what is now the Berry Farms Town Center site.

Who issues deck permits for Berry Farms — City of Franklin or Williamson County?

City of Franklin. Berry Farms sits inside the incorporated city limits of the City of Franklin — the master plan was negotiated through formal annexation and zoning processes, and Berry Farms has accounted for as much as 52 percent of the City's annual residential dwelling unit approvals in recent years. The City of Franklin Building & Neighborhood Services Department (120 9th Avenue South, 615-794-7012) issues the permit. City of Franklin operates under the 2024 IRC effective January 1, 2026. This is the same jurisdiction that handles Westhaven and McKay's Mill, opposite of unincorporated subdivisions like Legends Ridge and Laurelbrooke.

What is The Plunge at Berry Farms?

The Plunge is the Berry Farms community pool complex, which includes a 1,320-square-foot pool house, neighborhood park, and bocce courts. It is named in tribute to Willow Plunge, the historic Franklin swimming destination that opened in 1924 at the corner of Lewisburg Pike and Carnton Lane. The original Willow Plunge measured 75 by 150 feet and held 750,000 gallons of spring-fed water — nearly 100,000 gallons more than an Olympic-sized pool — making it the largest concrete swimming pool in the American South. Willow Plunge closed in 1967. Boyle Investment Company's master plan team named the Berry Farms pool The Plunge as a deliberate homage to that local memory.

What's in the Berry Farms Town Center?

The Berry Farms Town Center includes Edley's Bar-B-Que, Biscuit Love, Umi Japanese Restaurant, Chick-Fil-A, Drybar, Club Pilates, Berry Farms Wine & Spirits, First Bank, Goose Creek Pediatric Dentistry, Holiday Inn Express & Suites Franklin – Berry Farms (7100 Berry Farms Crossing), and Hampton Inn & Suites. The mixed-use design means residents can walk to dinner, fitness classes, dental appointments, and out-of-town family hotel stays within a five-minute radius of their home.

What are the HOA fees in Berry Farms?

HOA fees in Berry Farms vary by sub-neighborhood and home type. In the Hughes Mill section, dues run roughly $165 per month for townhouses and up to $235 per month for manor homes. The fees cover maintenance of the park, The Plunge pool complex and pool house, common areas, and other shared amenities. Different sub-neighborhoods (Hughes Mill, Berry Farms Chadwell, Town Center multi-family) have their own fee structures.

Berry Farms, Franklin TN: 200 Years of Berry Land, Built Out by Boyle, And a Pool Named for Willow Plunge

This is the rare Williamson County master-planned community built by Boyle Investment Company instead of Southern Land Company, on Berry family land continuously owned since the War of 1812, with a pool named after the largest concrete swimming pool the American South ever built.

There's a brass historical marker for Willow Plunge at the corner of Lewisburg Pike and Carnton Lane, two and a half miles north of where Berry Farms sits today. The marker tells you that Willow Plunge opened in 1924, held three quarters of a million gallons of spring-fed water, included tennis courts and a nine-hole golf course and a mini-golf course and a football field and an aviation field and a lake. It was the largest concrete swimming pool in the American South for most of the twentieth century. It closed in 1967. The land was filled in. The willow trees that gave it the name are gone.

The pool at Berry Farms is called The Plunge. It's a deliberate homage. The 1,320-square-foot pool house and the surrounding park were named, by Boyle Investment Company's master plan team, in tribute to the Williamson County summer destination most people who grew up here remember a parent or grandparent talking about. That is the kind of detail that tells you what kind of community Berry Farms is trying to be — one that holds a long memory of the place it sits on, even while it builds 600 acres of new mixed-use development on top of it.

This page is a working guide to Berry Farms — its history, its developer, its sub-neighborhoods, the City of Franklin permitting jurisdiction that applies inside its borders (Berry Farms is inside city limits, opposite of Legends Ridge and Laurelbrooke), the HOA Architectural Review process, and the small calls we've learned to make on builds in this specific community.

The Berry Family Has Owned This Land Since Colonel Martin Came Home From The War Of 1812

Avalyn Berry and Tyler Berry are direct descendants of Colonel "Buck" Martin, who served on Andrew Jackson's staff during the War of 1812. When Martin came home to Middle Tennessee, he built a house called Rural Plains on the land. Rural Plains stood on what is now the Berry Farms Town Center site. The Berry family carried the property through six generations, farmed it, watched I-65 get built across the western edge of it, watched the Cool Springs commercial district rise to the north, and finally — in the late 2000s — partnered with Boyle Investment Company on the master plan that became Berry Farms.

The historical chain matters because it's the explanation for the development's design philosophy. Berry Farms is not a tract subdivision dropped onto generic farmland. It's a master plan negotiated across a family's two-hundred-year relationship with the property, and the design choices reflect that — the preserved viewsheds toward the Harpeth River valley, the siting of the Town Center on the Rural Plains footprint, the pedestrian street grid that runs at human scale rather than commuter scale, and the naming conventions throughout the community that honor families who held the land before the asphalt did.

It's also why the Berry name appears on the road, on the signage, on the Town Center, and on the descendants who still live in the area and show up at HOA functions.

The Boyle Bet on the Southern Gateway

Boyle Investment Company — based in Memphis, with a strong presence in Greater Nashville commercial real estate — broke ground on Berry Farms in the late 2000s. The choice of Boyle as developer is itself notable: most of the high-profile master plans across Williamson County in the 2000s and 2010s came from Southern Land Company (Westhaven, Laurelbrooke, McEwen, Carronbridge). Berry Farms is one of the only large master plans in Franklin developed by a Memphis-based outfit instead, and that shows in the design. The Boyle plan favors mixed-use density, walkable retail, and integration with the I-65 commercial corridor in a way that the Southern Land plans for Westhaven and Laurelbrooke deliberately avoid.

The community sits at the Interstate 65 / Peytonsville Road interchange — what most locals call the Goose Creek Bypass exit — on 602 acres divided into three tracts. By 2021, City of Franklin development reports showed that approvals in Berry Farms accounted for roughly 52 percent of all 3,790 dwelling units approved by the City of Franklin that year. That's a working measure of how much of Franklin's recent residential growth is happening inside this single master plan.

The neighborhoods inside Berry Farms include Hughes Mill (townhouses and manor homes, with HOA dues running roughly $165 a month for townhouses up to $235 a month for manor homes), Berry Farms Chadwell, the Town Center multi-family residential, and several smaller adjacent residential pods. Each sub-neighborhood has slightly different design covenants, different allowable lot configurations, and different relationships to the Town Center walkability.

The Town Center Is Why People Walk Here

Most Williamson County master-planned communities have a swimming pool and a clubhouse. Berry Farms has a Town Center. The difference is that the Town Center includes commercial tenants you'd otherwise drive twenty minutes to reach:

Edley's Bar-B-Que, the Nashville-grown low-and-slow joint that smokes meats over Southern white oak and makes sides from scratch daily
Biscuit Love, the Nashville biscuit-and-breakfast institution with a Berry Farms location
Umi Japanese Restaurant
Chick-Fil-A
Drybar
Club Pilates
Berry Farms Wine & Spirits
First Bank
Goose Creek Pediatric Dentistry
Holiday Inn Express & Suites Franklin – Berry Farms at 7100 Berry Farms Crossing
Hampton Inn & Suites

A homeowner inside Berry Farms can walk to a barbecue dinner, a pilates class, a dentist appointment, a wine purchase, and an out-of-town family member's hotel room within a five-minute radius of their front porch. That changes the social geometry of the neighborhood — it changes how often people are on the street, how the community uses the Town Center patio space, and how the back-yard deck functions in relation to everything else. The Berry Farms deck is rarely the only social space on the property; it's part of a network that includes the Town Center patios and The Plunge.

The Plunge: Berry Farms's Direct Tribute to the Largest Concrete Pool the South Ever Had

Willow Plunge opened in 1924 on the corner of Lewisburg Pike and Carnton Lane, built by the Kinnard family. The pool measured 75 feet by 150 feet. It held 750,000 gallons of spring-fed water — nearly a hundred thousand gallons more than an Olympic pool. In 1927 the Kinnards divided it into a main pool and a separate kiddie pool. Through the 1930s, the Tennessean called it one of the most popular and best equipped swimming pools in the United States. The site included tennis courts, a nine-hole golf course, a miniature golf course, a football field, an aviation field, and a lake. Generations of Williamson County kids spent their summers there. When Kinnard Jr. died in 1966, his widow Ruth made the decision to close it. In 1967 the pool was filled in and the land was sold.

The Plunge at Berry Farms — the neighborhood pool with the 1,320-square-foot pool house, the bocce courts, and the family-anchored programming through the warm months — is named in tribute. Boyle Investment Company's design team chose the name deliberately. For a homeowner looking at what kind of community Berry Farms is, the choice is the answer: this is a community that names its pool after a memory, not a sponsor. The deck you build on the back of your home here is going to be used by a family that walks to The Plunge in the summer.

The Architectural Review Committee, Hughes Mill Edition

Every exterior modification to a Berry Farms home — including new decks, replacement decks, screened porches, pergolas, covered structures, railing changes, and material swaps on existing decks — needs HOA Architectural Review Committee approval before the City of Franklin will issue a building permit. The HOA enforces the design standards that keep the Boyle master plan visually coherent across the sub-neighborhoods.

The submission packet for an exterior modification typically includes:

A site plan showing the deck footprint, dimensions, setbacks (especially critical on the Hughes Mill townhouses where shared walls and zero-lot-line conditions apply)
Elevation drawings showing the deck's height above grade and the relationship to neighboring units
Material specifications listing the decking line, the railing system, the post wraps, and the fastener system
Color samples or product cut sheets keyed to Berry Farms's master-plan palette — earth tones, wood tones, natural stones
Construction timeline and crew access plan, including coordination with Town Center delivery hours when staging requires it

Typical review window: Berry Farms ARC turnaround in our experience runs about two to three weeks from a complete submission. Hughes Mill submissions tend to clear faster than the manor home sections because the design covenants are more standardized for the townhouse footprints; the manor homes get more architectural scrutiny because the lots are larger and the design choices have more visibility from the street and from neighbors.

The ARC pays particular attention to:

Shared-wall and zero-lot-line setbacks in the Hughes Mill townhouse sections. The deck has to respect the neighbor's wall to the inch, and the design must account for sound transfer through the structural connection.
Master-plan visual coherence. Bright colors, white vinyl railing on brick-fronted homes, anything that breaks the earth-tone-and-natural-material palette gets reviewed hard.
Visibility from the Town Center walkways and the internal collector streets. A deck that backs to a Town Center sight line clears differently than a deck tucked into the back of a manor-home cul-de-sac.

City of Franklin Permits Inside Berry Farms

Berry Farms is inside the incorporated City of Franklin city limits — the Boyle master plan was negotiated with the City through formal annexation and zoning processes, and the development has been generating City of Franklin permit volume in the thousands of dwelling units since the late 2000s. That means City of Franklin Building & Neighborhood Services issues the permit, not Williamson County.

This is the same jurisdiction that handles Westhaven and McKay's Mill. It's opposite of Legends Ridge and Laurelbrooke, which sit in unincorporated Williamson County a few miles north.

The practical implications:

City of Franklin Building & Neighborhood Services: 120 9th Avenue South, Franklin, TN 37064. (615) 794-7012.
Code edition: 2024 International Residential Code, effective January 1, 2026. Plus the 2009 IECC for residential and the 2023 NEC.
Submission: Electronic Plan Review System.
Processing target: 7 working days or less for residential.

Sequence for a Berry Farms deck: HOA Architectural Review approval first (2-3 weeks), then City of Franklin permit submission (1 week or less to issue once ARC approval is in hand), then inspections during construction — footing, framing, final.

Building to IRC R507 in a Mixed-Use Master Plan

The 2024 IRC's R507 governs every deck we build in Berry Farms. The mixed-use, dense master-plan character of the community changes a few of the structural details:

Hughes Mill townhouse decks. The shared-wall condition means the deck has to attach to the home's structural framing without transferring load through the party wall. We engineer the ledger-to-framing connection on a per-unit basis and coordinate with the adjacent owner before any structural fasteners go through.
Footings. IRC R403.1.4 sets a 12-inch minimum below undisturbed grade. Berry Farms's south-Franklin clay subgrade is generally compacted and stable across the residential pods, but the lots closer to the Town Center transition zones can have post-construction fill that needs deeper footings — typically 30 to 36 inches on those lots to clear the fill and seat in undisturbed clay.
Ledger attachment on brick and stone facades. Half-inch lag screws or through-bolts, Simpson DTT2Z lateral load anchors at the corners, step flashing layered correctly. The ledger attaches to the structural framing behind the brick or stone, never to the veneer itself.
Hardware. Simpson Strong-Tie joist hangers, hurricane ties, post bases. The 2024 IRC update tightened joist hanger specification standards; we use the higher-grade hangers across every build now.
Guards. 36-inch minimum height residential, four-inch sphere rule on balusters. On Hughes Mill townhouse decks where the deck overhangs a sidewalk or shared courtyard, we sometimes engineer guard-rail attachment beyond minimum code; the consequence of failure is meaningfully worse over a public walkway than over a private back yard.

Materials That Match Boyle's Master-Plan Palette

The Berry Farms master plan favors earth-tone, natural-material aesthetics consistent with the community's claim to historical continuity with the Berry family land. After 25 years of seeing decks come back for rebuilds in Williamson County, our short list for Berry Farms specifically:

TimberTech AZEK Vintage Collection. Capped PVC. The English Walnut, Weathered Teak, and Coastline finishes pair cleanly with both the brick-traditional Hughes Mill manor homes and the farmhouse-modern Chadwell sections. 50-year limited lifetime fade and stain warranty.

Trex Transcend / Trex Signature. Wood-fiber-and-plastic composite. Spiced Rum and Vintage Lantern both work against the earth-tone palette. Heavier than AZEK; we steer south-facing decks toward AZEK on the Hughes Mill manor sections where afternoon sun is direct and uninterrupted.

Deckorators Voyage. Mineral-based composite. Best for the multi-level decks on the larger Chadwell lots that step down toward the back property line.

Pressure-treated yellow pine with Cabot's solid stain. Works in Berry Farms but uncommon. The master plan's design covenants and the typical homeowner's maintenance posture push toward cap-stocked composites and PVC.

For railing: aluminum balusters in black or bronze are the most-approved configuration. Cable rail clears in Chadwell and on the manor home back-elevation views that don't face the Town Center walkways. Composite balusters work in the more traditional brick-fronted Hughes Mill sections. White vinyl rarely passes the ARC.

Working a Berry Farms Site

A few things you only learn by working a Berry Farms build:

The Town Center delivery windows matter. Material delivery and trailer staging works best mid-morning or mid-afternoon — avoid the lunch and dinner peak hours when Edley's, Biscuit Love, and the other Town Center tenants are running active service. Crews and customers compete for the same on-street parking on Berry Farms Crossing during those windows.

The Hughes Mill townhouse access is tight. Material delivery on a townhouse build often requires coordinating with the adjacent owner for staging room. We talk to the neighbor before scheduling the concrete or framing days.

The Goose Creek Bypass / I-65 interchange backs up at peak commute. Crew arrival before 7:30 a.m. and departure before 4:30 p.m. is the practical workaround on a working day.

Lunch on a long day is Edley's Bar-B-Que or Biscuit Love at the Town Center. Design meetings with a Berry Farms client work well at the Holiday Inn lobby coffee area, the Hampton Inn lobby, or the Town Center patio when the weather is right.

A Note on Colonel Martin's Rural Plains

The house Colonel "Buck" Martin built when he came home from Andrew Jackson's War of 1812 staff was called Rural Plains. It stood for most of two centuries on what is now the Berry Farms Town Center site. The Berry family is direct descended from Colonel Martin. Avalyn Berry and Tyler Berry, who inherited the responsibility for the family's land in the modern era, partnered with Boyle Investment Company on the master plan that built around the original Rural Plains footprint instead of erasing it.

The Plunge is the second deliberate gesture toward local memory. The first one is the development itself — a Town Center sited where the Berry family farmhouse stood, named for the family who carried the land for two hundred years, kept partly in continuity with the agricultural and historical character that made the property worth keeping in the first place.

When you build a deck in Berry Farms, the structure is going on top of soil that supported a War of 1812 veteran's homestead and six generations of working farm. None of that is on the building permit. It's the kind of context that explains why the master plan reads the way it does, and why the homeowners who choose Berry Farms tend to choose it specifically and not by accident.

When you're ready to build, that context is part of what we bring to the design conversation.

Deck Craft

A Tennessee Licensed General Contractor (TN GC #78722). Member of the Williamson County Chamber of Commerce. Building custom decks across Franklin and Williamson County since 1999. (615) 845-9300. 231 Public Square, Franklin, TN 37064.