A man-made lagoon with a Bellagio-like fountain will be the highlight of a mixed-use project outside Dallas

In late April, a public-private partnership with the city of Rowlett, Texas, officially broke ground on Bayside, a $1 billion, 262-acre mixed-use development anchored by an eight-acre blue lagoon that would be the first of its kind in this state.

Rowlett is 15 miles east of downtown Dallas, “and it’s not often that you find yourself on a peninsula on a lake outside a major metro area,” Kent Donahue, a local developer and managing partner of Bayside Land Partners, told the Dallas Business Journal. 

Humphreys & Partners Architects is the firm behind Bayside’s master design.

Donahue has been working for three years on this project, located along the shores of Lake Ray Hubbard. The property was once called Elgin B. Robinson Park and had been owned by the City of Dallas Parks Department. Donahue purchased the land for $31.8 million.

Donahue is working with TxDOT and the North Central Texas Council of Governments to put in a new overpass on Interstate-30 to connect the two pieces of Bayside real estate.

Western Rim of Coppell, Texas, will soon begin Phase I construction on 845 luxury apartments, 600 townhouses and single-family homes, and 400,000 sf of retail and office space. Roadways on the north side of Bayside should be ready by September, and the first part of the project will start receiving residents and tenants in the fall of 2017.

The second phase, according to the Journal, would include a 500-room resort, a marina with 1,000 boat slips, 650 luxury apartments, 450 high-rise condos, 300,000 sf of entertainment space, 800,000 sf of office and retail space, and the blue lagoon. 

The $1.1 million lagoon—essentially a giant swimming pool with 10 football fields worth of water—is fashioned after water attractions at other resorts, such as Cabo San Lucas in Mexico, and the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. Its 150-nozzle, 280-foot show fountain “can shoot water 200 feet in the air with LED lights,” the Journal reports. Miami-based Crystal Lagoons developed the lagoon’s filtration system. This would be Crystal Lagoons’ first lagoon in Texas, and its 12^th in the U.S.

An open-air trolley system that would run around the lagoon’s periphery is also planned. Bayside also calls for walking and biking trails, dog parks, and a launch point for kite surfers.

“We are excited about what it means not only to Rowlett but the entire D-FW region and the state of Texas,” Jim Grabenhorst, Rowlett’s economic development director, told the Dallas Morning News. “It has the potential to be the front door to Rowlett.”

The latter phase should be ready by fall of 2018.