Clay Hill

Clay Hill is a planned wellness resort on roughly 550 acres of rolling former citrus and cattle land near Clay Hill Road and the I-75 and Blanton Road interchange outside Dade City, spanning the Pasco and Hernando county line. Siblings Blake Casper, CEO of Caspers Company, Florida's largest McDonald's franchisee, and Allison Casper Adams, the pair behind Tampa's Oxford Exchange, Stovall House and The Current hotel at Rocky Point, are developing it as a back-to-nature counterpart to Florida's beach, golf and theme-park resorts, citing Blackberry Mountain in Tennessee and England's Soho Farmhouse as models. Plans call for a 130-key resort with a wellness spa, sauna and cold plunge, several farm-to-table restaurants supplied by a working farm, a chapel, a clubhouse, an equestrian center where guests can bring their own horses, tennis and pickleball courts, meditation and yoga spaces, bike and kayak rentals, and up to 50 estate-style residences on 1.5- to 2-acre homesites, with pedestrian and equestrian paths favored over roads. About 80 to 85 percent of the property, previously owned by the citrus-pioneering Evans family and still run as cattle pasture, is to stay in its natural state, and the project would not require county water or sewer. Rezoning is moving through Pasco County with Hernando County to follow, and the resort is projected to create more than 200 long-term jobs.