At Windsong Ranch, you can spy sunseekers strolling along white sand beaches as electric turquoise waters from a vast lagoon lap their feet. Atop the oceanic ripples, kayakers plunge their paddles into deep waters as paddleboarders skim across the surface in full view of those loafing in sand-lodged lounge chairs or spiking serves on the beach volleyball court.
Squint hard, and you can almost see schools of prismatic tropical fish scattering near the water’s edge. Grab the snorkel and beach booties. Drop-shift into a daiquiri-fueled haze, and it’s easy to imagine the panicked scramble of swimmers racing to escape a shark’s dorsal fin slicing through the diminutive ripples.
No, this isn’t Punta Cana, the Caymans or even Newport Beach. It’s the rich landlocked Blackland Prairie in Prosper along U.S. Highway 380.
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Windsong Ranch is a 2,030-acre master-planned residential expanse with 3,324 upscale single-family homes. Its amenity portfolio is bursting at the seams with a café, tennis, pickleball and basketball courts, a two-acre lake, a mountain biking course, 30 miles of trails, a splash park and an outdoor living room with a fireplace. Opened in 2014, this residential Shangri-La installed a five-acre sand-framed freshwater lagoon in 2019.
“One of the features of our brand is lots of amenities,” says Craig Martin, founder and CEO of the Tellus Group, the firm that acquired this housing mecca from Terra Verde Group in 2019. “It’s like having a cruise director in our neighborhood.”
He tells me that the lifestyle programming in Tellus Group communities is as important as the amusements, with marine amenities dominating due to the blistering Texas swelter. The water amusement bug is spreading rapidly across Collin County. And Beyond.
Think of Windsong Ranch as the sudden drawback of seawater from the beach just before a tsunami strikes. A massive surge of beach-inspired residential and recreational developments is about to sweep across North Texas: AnaCapri in Anna. The Venetian in Celina. Sicily in Princeton. Cannon Beach in McKinney. The lazy river and pool complex at Mosaic in Celina.
Land-locked Collin County is being flooded with master-planned residential and resort-style communities that showcase multi-acre sandy beach lagoons, river and lake complexes, and surfing pools.
Developers like Dallas-based Megatel Homes, Plano-based Tellus Group, and Arizona-based Cole Cannon are sinking big bucks into exploiting their potential.
“Water is relaxing to a lot of people,” says Marcus Moffit, adjunct professor of real estate at the University of North Texas’ G. Brint Ryan College of Business. “The mental benefit of being around a body of water has that draw. And then you have the recreational component.”
Like Windsong Ranch, many of these developments feature artificial lagoons that mimic the shallow saltwater pools separated from the sea by a low sandbank, barrier island or coral reef. Artificial lagoons are rapidly becoming a driving force in community development, with dozens of these projects underway across the state of Texas. Many of these pools are created by Miami-based Crystal Lagoons, a pioneer in manmade lagoon technology. Gallon per gallon, these massive pools require far fewer chemicals and consume significantly less energy than traditional swimming pools. Thing is, you just need lots of gallons to fill these lagoons.
The Tellus Group’s Martin says he drew inspiration for the Windsong Ranch lagoon from the Crystal Lagoon at the Du Monte Resort in Cabo San Lucas, a sprawling 10-acre saltwater pool overlooking sand dunes stretching to the Pacific Ocean. But lagoons are just one aspect of this water-centric trend. Mosaic, the Tellus Group’s 760-acre, 1,500-home development in Celina, features a lazy river and pool complex along with lakes spoked with fishing piers. The project is set to open in July of 2025.
“The lazy river is going to be an epic, cool water feature,” boasts Martin.
Meraki, another lazy river project in Forney, is also in the Tellus torpedo tubes, set to launch in the fall of 2025. But there’s more. Arizona-based developer Cole Cannon is planning a $200 million, 35-acre mixed-use destination project at Stacy Road and State Highway 121 in McKinney, aimed at bringing ocean waves to Collin County. Dubbed Cannon Beach, the development will showcase a boutique hotel, high-end restaurants, retail and office spaces, salons, med spas, and a 4-acre surf lagoon. He describes it as the intersection of lifestyle and adrenaline.
“I call it an experiential resort,” Cannon says. “A major fun zone.”
Catering to both beginners and experienced surfers, the surf lagoon is equipped with adjustable wave technology to create customized grinders. The resort offers lounge areas, cabanas with food service and cliff diving in addition to surfing. Slated to open in 2027, Cannon Beach is the Texas version of a similar surfing project that Cannon recently spearheaded in Mesa, Arizona.
But what happens when the blistering Texas heat dissipates, and winter breathes an icy chill into the towering waves of Cannon Beach?
“Surfers are very resilient people,” Cannon insists. “If there is a way, they will surf it… I have no concern, even with snow on the ground, that the surf pool won’t be very popular.”
During the North Texas winter months, Cannon Beach will deploy a series of in-ground hot tubs to create a lava hot springs milieu with steaming bodies of water. So, a surfer who just got out of the surf pool, can peel off their wetsuit and jump into the hot tub or enjoy a bonfire.
Cannon says he’s long wanted to bring the surfing life to North Texas, citing the demographics and growth potential. He’s not alone.
“I think it’s really in this area of the country, people who live here… they are just more adventurous in how they recreate,” says Michael Kowski, president & CEO at the McKinney Economic Development Corporation. “I would submit that people would fly here from all over the country to enjoy it. Surfers are no longer just located on the coasts.”
Fireside Surf, a surf-themed restaurant and wave pool in The Colony, offers landlocked surfers, bodyboarders, and body surfers deep-water waves up to six feet high. Opened in 2024, the complex offers aquatic enthusiasts the Splash Lounge at Fireside Surf, a full bar and restaurant that features cuisine crafted from ingredients from the world’s top surfing spots.
“I actually think it’s a global trend, particularly in warm environments,” says Cannon. “Surf technology has gotten to a commercially feasible level.”
Kowski adds that people and companies have been relocating to Texas from coastal communities for decades. Thus, the explosion in water-based community development makes sense. Yet it isn’t clear when many of these master-planned lagoon and pool complexes will open.
“Sicily is under construction, says Princeton Planning Manager Craig Fisher of the Megatel Homes project. “They’ve received a permit for the lagoon, but they haven’t really begun construction. It was supposed to be done by the end of last year, 2024… and it’s still just a dirt field.”
This oceanic playground trend extends far beyond Collin County. Megatel Homes is planning SoHo Square in Dallas, Bellagio in Forney and Santori in Seagoville, each boasting a large lagoon.
But perhaps the hyperactive apex of this flurry of waterborne leisure is reached by the Sapphire Bay Resort in Rowlett, a $1.5 billion mixed-use development emerging on the shores of Lake Ray Hubbard. Led by Sapphire Bay Partners, a group that includes Gillenwater Development and Suntex Marinas, the expansive project features upscale housing, a hotel, restaurants, retail, office space, a 7-acre lagoon, a surf pool with 7-foot waves, a lazy river pool complex, and a 3,200-seat concert venue.
After hiccups that included a change in developers and a fire at the project’s under-construction apartment complex in late 2023, Sapphire Bay is projected to fully bloom in all of its aquatic glory between 2026 and 2027. The North Texas sluice gates are unleashing a gush.
North Texas’ pseudo-beach love may have its roots in the unlikeliest of places: Dallas City Hall. In 1978 when famed architect I.M. Pei’s Dallas City Hall opened, residents unleashed a torrent of criticism. They scoffed at the Brutalist structure’s dramatic overhanging cantilevered façade. They ridiculed the plaza, the vast, largely useless space in front of the building.
The pacifier? Dallas City Hall Beach Day. City officials had tons of sand trucked in and dumped around city hall’s plaza fountain to create a lapping shoreline motif. They followed this up by installing lifeguard stands. On a hot summer day in 1984, hundreds of Dallasites showed up to splash, swim, and cool-off in front of Pei’s inverted layer cake architecture in what is perhaps the weirdest Texas PR stunt ever devised. The sands of City Hall Beach Day wreaked havoc on the fountain’s pumps for months afterward.
But the seemingly absurd actualization of the region’s beachfront obsession prompts another question: why does the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex even exist? This tract of semi-arid temperate grassland, interspersed with tree-lined creeks and shrublands, really has no reason for being. There’s no major port, no navigable river and no entrance to a mountain pass to justify an urban metropolis. That only fueled the audacity of the area’s early trailblazers. In 1891 a group of prominent Dallas citizens formed the Trinity River Navigation Company, a firm that launched a near century-long failed drive to make the Trinity River navigable with the goal to create a waterway for sea-going vessels from Galveston Bay to an envisioned port in Dallas.
If it weren’t for the shrewd maneuvering of early Dallas leaders, this expanse of Blackland Prairie ground wouldn’t support anything but cotton and scrub grass for cattle grazing, much less a metropolitan area. In the late 19th century, they brought the railroads. In 1914, leaders secured the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, one of 12 regional banks in the Federal Reserve System.
Thanks to this pioneering resilience, this prairie land has blossomed into the most populous metropolitan area in Texas and the Southern United States. It serves as a thriving hub for energy, finance, real estate, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and telecommunications. This historical metamorphosis underscores the uncanny ability of the people in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to create something big and bold out of nothing.
In the 1970s, the region’s leaders transformed vast stretches of scrubland into Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, a premier hub that consistently ranks among the top ten airports globally for international connectivity. In the early 1980s, future Texas billionaire Henry Ross Perot envisioned a sprawling business park in Collin County’s vast openness to house the future headquarters of his company, Electronic Data Systems. That commercial complex would eventually attract other corporate giants and trigger a wave of explosive growth in Plano and the Collin County cities on its northern rim.
With the influx of money, people, and assets comes a thirst for recreation and perhaps a permanent vacation. By creating manmade lagoons and surf pools, developers tap this long-held craving, providing residents of this inland expanse with a Caribbean lifestyle — without enduring the hassle of airport security for a trip to the beach.
Like Dallas City Hall, the city of Princeton pioneered this North Texas water-leisure craze long before beachy lagoons, lazy rivers, and surf pools were carved from its rich soil. Established in 1999, Princeton Lakes is a private residential community featuring four interconnected lakes specially designed for competitive water skiing. These lakes range in length from about 1,900 to 2,300 feet and have a width of 330 feet. They include slalom and jump courses along shorelines engineered to minimize motorboat wake backwash into the courses.
Each of Princeton Lakes’ approximately 40 waterfront homes includes a boat dock. Many residents compete in local, regional, and national water skiing competitions, and the community hosts several American Water Ski Association (AWSA) tournaments each year.
“It’s one of the nicer communities we have in town,” says Princeton’s Fisher.
Mark Cohen, an avid water skier, purchased a lot in 2014 and began building a home in Princeton Lakes in 2016 before relocating from Plano.
“I’ve skied all over Texas and this is one of the top ski lakes in the state,” he says. “If I was on a public lake today, I’d be petrified of being run over or hit by another boat…It’s totally private. You can’t beat it.”
Who knew this North Texas water-skiing locus even existed? I was first introduced to this slalom spray subdivision while indulging in a classic Texas ritual: drinking beer. I was sipping a selection of craft brews at Big Spray Brewery, little glass cups of Driver Buoy Blond, Long Line Pale Ale, and Deep Water Porter served on a flight board shaped like a water ski.
Residents of Princeton Lakes and water-skiing enthusiasts, Big Spray founders Doug and Evelyn Abbott billed their pub as a restaurant serving house-brewed suds poured from taps with handles shaped like water skis. Opening in December of 2020, Big Spray Brewery shuttered in October of 2023 after nearly three years in operation. While the concept sounds cool, the merging of craft brew froth and wake backwash struggled to maintain its footing.
What is driving the trend towards housing and mixed-use developments that showcase elaborate water features in North Texas? Several factors contribute to this trend, including land availability and a growing demand for luxury, resort-style living evoking an ocean escape.
“There’re always people looking to try something new,” says UNT’s Moffitt. “So, developers are asking, ‘What can I do to differentiate my product from what’s out there?’ The goal is to create a destination, otherwise you’re just another community… It’s a driver for people to want to come to your town, to your development.”
McKinney’s Kowski agrees. He says people from North Texas are well-traveled and are eager to cross borders to experience something interesting. So why not keep that taste for the interesting focused on the home front?
“Part of our strategy in McKinney is to give people more and more reasons not to leave here,” he says. “Cities have been branding themselves as live, work and play for generations. In McKinney, we take that mantra pretty seriously.”
But perhaps the most potent impetus propelling this North Texas movement toward surf and sand is the inflow of companies and people from California, the surfing and beach culture capital of the U.S. Major firms pulling up stakes from California and sinking them in North Texas include Toyota of North America, McKesson Corporation, Charles Schwab and Xerox. These companies and their employees are drawn here by lower taxes and living costs, less restrictive regulation, bigger bang-for-the-buck housing, and a robust networking culture that’s second to none. I relocated here myself from the San Francisco Bay Area decades ago for these same reasons.
And let’s not forget the harsh COVID-19 pandemic restrictions imposed by the Golden State, measures that devastated countless livelihoods and businesses not named The French Laundry. Between 2020 and 2024 alone, 175 companies moved to Texas, with 55 percent of them coming from California — an escape from sunny Alcatraz.
With these crowds come their leisurely lifestyle and the sand between their toes, and real estate developers eager to make lagoon livin’ a reality.
This story originally appeared in the May/June 2025 issue of Local Profile. To subscribe, click here.
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