Steve Hicks is a dentist in Mobile. Paul Stewart spent years selling coffee and tea for Hill and Brooks, the business owned by his father-in-law. The two became friends at church, their families sharing dinners and entertainment, and it was on a train trip that the partnership was born. As Steve put it: if he was ever going to form a business with someone, it would be Paul Stewart.
Today the two part-time developers are the men behind Beach Village Resort, a gated Orange Beach community of gold-fortified vacation cottages — or “casitas” — with a resort pool, a lazy river and direct access to the Gulf beach and Gulf State Park. The project is the latest chapter in a partnership that has shaped Orange Beach real estate for decades.
The First House on the Gulf
Paul was working for Hill and Brooks when, in his late twenties, he bought a lot in Orange Beach to build a family beach house. A new beach rental craze was exploding, and to offset expenses he placed the house in a vacation rental program. “I realized I was making more money in the rental business than I was selling coffee and tea,” he says. That realization created the investment partnership with Steve.
Their first joint project was a gulf-front house plan, researched for what renters actually wanted: a five- or six-bedroom beach house with a pool. With input from Kaiser Realty, they built it — and Kaiser began taking reservations the following summer before construction was even complete. In its first year on the rental market, the house was the number one beach rental for Kaiser Realty. When the property’s value passed a million dollars, Steve said “Let’s sell it!” The first offer fell through; two weeks later they had an offer $200,000 higher, and they sold.
Boom, Bust and the Lessons Between
The partners rode the hot market into more ambitious deals. They took the proceeds and assumed a failed project at Perdido Pass, adding partners to create Porto Del Sol, a 34-unit condominium with a deep-water marina, indoor and outdoor pools and views of Robinson Island. After selling Porto del Sol, they reinvested — and then the economy collapsed around 2008-09. Holding raw land and beach lots nobody wanted to buy, Paul and Steve made monthly payments they jokingly called “chin ups,” because you had to keep your chin up. “We survived 2010, and that’s about all,” Paul says.
The downturn allowed them to buy properties at reduced prices. One was 10 acres in Orange Beach that became Cottages at Romar: they planned the lots, wrote the subdivision documents and by-laws, completed the infrastructure, and sold the project to Kaiser Realty in 2012. It remains one of the premier rental communities in Orange Beach. Around the same time they bought a bank-owned project on the Intracoastal in Bon Secour, pitched mixed-use plans to Gulf Shores, and ultimately sold when nothing won approval.
Studying the 30-A corridor in the Florida panhandle — Seaside, Watercolor and their rear-loaded cottages — the pair refined a philosophy: build high quality, don’t cut corners, and people will buy. “We were told over and over that people wouldn’t pay for nice stuff,” Paul says. “We disagreed.” In 2014 they developed Sugar Sands RV Resort, a 60-unit luxury RV property on the Baldwin County Beach Express, and sold it in 2018.
Building Beach Village
The 21-acre parcel that became Beach Village Resort was purchased out of bankruptcy, adjacent to Tannin Village — wetlands, lakes, marsh, and access to 30 miles of biking trails in Gulf State Park. They engaged WAS Design in Foley to design the community, and traveled to resort properties, including Mahogany Bay in Belize, hunting for ideas that would separate Beach Village from single-home village developments.
The plan: exceptionally high-quality small cottages, or “casitas,” in three phases — the first 21 homes with two bedrooms and two and a half baths, ideal for two families traveling together; a second phase of 16 homes with back porches; and a third phase of 30 larger homes with options for an office or bunk room. The final homes, the largest at roughly 3,000 square feet, can accommodate 15 to 20 people. Each home is built to gold-fortified standards, with 12-foot ceilings on the main floor and 10-foot ceilings upstairs, a private outdoor shower, and a personality expressed in each owner’s chosen name and decor — casitas like “Toes in the Water” and “Anchors Away.”
The casitas face an interior courtyard with a zero-entry pool, a children’s water slide and a lazy river — heated in winter, cooled in summer. A covered common area houses dining tables and TVs, every home connects to a private walking bridge into Gulf State Park, and during peak season a Jeep shuttle carries guests to the public Gulf beach across Perdido Beach Boulevard. The community is gated, self-contained and traffic-free by design, so small children can ride bikes without fear.
The Pool Is the Hub
Beach Village’s activity calendar gives it a resort rhythm: live music by the pool every Monday afternoon, naturalist-led “BVR Discussions” on Tuesday mornings, yoga by the pool on Wednesdays, trivia and poolside movie nights through the week. On-site management handles any need for owners and guests alike. Liquid Life Vacation Rentals handles all rentals, and most casitas are available to book.
The development began in October 2019 and was nearly complete by the time of its recent milestone, with the final homes under construction. So what is next for Steve and Paul? “We are just two entrepreneurs with different careers still going strong,” Steve says. For Orange Beach, the result is a community that borrows the best ideas of 30-A’s cottage villages — rear-loaded homes, natural areas, family design — and plants them directly across from Alabama’s white sand, with a state park trailhead out the back gate.