40-Home Development at Former Bell Labs Gets Nod by Holmdel Planning Board

The Holmdel Planning Board unanimously agreed Tuesday night to grant Toll Brothers preliminary and final site plan approval to build 40 luxury homes on a 103-acre parcel situated at Crawfords Corner and Roberts Roads. 

Bell Place at Holmdel, as the project is known, will feature houses with four bedrooms, three-car garages and three and half-bath minimums. (See photos.) They will range from approximately 3,600 feet up to 5,000 feet, and will sell for between $1.2 million to $1.5 million after a year of construction, said company representatives.

A 200-foot wide buffer and berm will hide the houses from the roads, and a 40 foot buffer will hide the homes from the ring road around the former Bell Labs building, which is destined to become a mixed-use facility by Somerset Development. Access to the neighborhood roadway will be via a landscaped "boulevard" from Roberts Road that ends at the ring road.  The homes will flank a curving roadway dotted with several cul-de-sacs. 

It will be lit at night from high-end colonial-style streetlights. The homes will connect to the main building's pump station for sanitary sewer service. 

Bell Place homeowners will have pay monthly dues to a homeowner's association for maintenance of common areas and the a wet-basin pond, which will be an aesthetic feature of the neighborhood at the entranceway. 

Although 240 trees will come down for the development, Toll Brothers plans to plant 967 new deciduous and evergreen trees. 

More than a dozen residents attended the meeting to hear about the plan. Larry Fink, the former Township Committeeman who has participated in efforts to stitch together an unbroken six-mile stream side trail through Holmdel parks, asked for a dedicated path through the property for walkers that is currently not part of the plan. William Kassining of the Monmouth Conservation Society asked if his group could assume stewardship of the easements on the property. In approving the site plan, Mayor Patrick Impreveduto said those requests, among others brought up at the meeting, would be considered in further talks by Toll Brothers and Holmdel township.