AdventHealth, HCA adding new facilities near Legoland

Less than a mile southeast of Legoland Florida in Winter Haven, a four-story hospital and other commercial development is slated for several parcels of vacant land on the north side of Cypress Gardens Boulevard. Two rezonings that won approval Monday night will help pave the way for some of the development to happen.

Here’s what’s coming on three different properties along that stretch of road:

AdventHealth plans to build a 192-bed hospital with an emergency room. It’ll be the centerpiece of a 42-acre medical campus on Cypress Gardens Boulevard roughly 1,500 feet west of Cypress Gardens Road. The emergency room is to open before the rest of the hospital, AdventHealth said.

Construction hasn’t started. The hospital will offer primary care, cardiology, gastroenterology, orthopedic and urology services. AdventHealth has been eyeing an expansion in Winter Haven for several years. The company previously submitted plans for a hospital at the intersection of Cypress Gardens Boulevard and U.S. 17 but backed out of that project in favor of the site closer to Legoland.

Just to the west of the hospital parcel is a 26-acre property — a long, narrow strip of land that hugs the north side of the boulevard. It had previously been zoned for a “planned unit development,” meaning a future residential neighborhood.

On Monday night, the Winter Haven City Commission changed it to commercial zoning, which will allow the landowners to subdivide the property for commercial use. Nothing specific is planned yet for the property located just south of River Lake.

“It will likely be a mix of retail and office-type uses,” economic development director Eric Labbe said at a previous commission meeting. Since 2005 the property has been owned by Double Eagle Land Development, an affiliate of Sarasota-based developer Thomas Taylor Jr.

And finally, another standalone emergency room is planned for a parcel near the northwest corner of Cypress Gardens Boulevard and Cypress Gardens Road, next to an existing CVS pharmacy.

HCA is planning the 10,860-square-foot freestanding emergency room, Winter Haven Planning Manager Sean Byers told GrowthSpotter. Winter Haven commissioners approved a rezoning of the property Monday night.

These three developments join a slew of others that are going up along Cypress Gardens Boulevard, which has evolved into Winter Haven’s latest growth hotspot due to Legoland’s expansions. A year ago, it opened the world’s first Peppa Pig theme park.

“There’s a lot of different things going on up and down that corridor,” Byers said. “Now we’re seeing multifamily residential starting to fill in along Cypress Gardens Boulevard. It’s really addressing the city’s overall shortage of multifamily residential units.”

Two major multifamily developments are slated for that stretch of road:

• The Village at Cypress Gardens, a 270-unit community being developed by A.I.A. and Associates LLC, is under construction northwest of the intersection of Cypress Gardens Boulevard and Cypress Gardens Road, near the existing CVS and the soon-to-be-built HCA emergency room.
• The Prose at Winter Haven is a 324-unit apartment complex planned for the south side of Cypress Gardens Boulevard to the west of the planned AdventHealth hospital. Alliance Residential Company is developing the complex.

Closer to Legoland on Cypress Gardens Boulevard, a Best Western hotel is under construction and a Hilton Home2 Suites is in the planning stages. Texas-based Forestar is developing a 1,100-lot master-planned community for D.R. Horton on 350 acres known as Harmony on Lake Eloise.

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