About Serenbe

What is Serenbe?

Serenbe is an award winning biophilic community that connects people to nature
and each other.

Each of Serenbe’s hamlets have complementary commercial centers focused on the elements of a well-lived life: arts for inspiration, agriculture for nourishment, health for wellbeing, play for a joy-filled life, and education for awareness.

Fresh food is another of Serenbe’s natural assets, with a 25-acre organic farm, seasonal Saturday Farmer’s Market, thriving CSA program and edible landscaping, including blueberry bushes along paths and sidewalks.

Year-round cultural events include outdoor performances from Terminus Modern Ballet, regional theatre, film series, culinary workshops and festivals, music events, and lectures, boutique shopping, art galleries, wellness services and trail riding, plus visiting artists in residence with classes, dinners and talks.

Serenbe is a place you can enjoy for a meal, a weekend or call home for a lifetime.

History & Vision

If you want to change the world, you should start in your own backyard.

Serenbe founders Steve Nygren and Marie Lupo Nygren believe that if you want to change the world, start in your own backyard. The couple discovered the property now known as Serenbe on a weekend outing to introduce their three girls to the Georgia countryside in 1991. Weekend visits for the family transformed their lives, and three years later they sold their Atlanta home and relocated full-time to Serenbe.

The vision for the community of Serenbe was born in an effort to protect the beautiful rural land just outside of Atlanta known as Chattahoochee Hill Country. The first house at Serenbe was built in 2004 and today the community is home to over 650 residents. Serenbe has won numerous awards including the Urban Land Institute Inaugural Sustainability Award, the Atlanta Regional Commission “Development of Excellence“ and EarthCraft named Serenbe the “Development of the Year.”

They say that if you want to change the world, you should start in your own backyard. If that’s so, then Serenbe is quite a beginning.

At Serenbe we value nature, passion, creativity and community. We believe people can live more fully when connected to the wonder of nature. We value people for who they are, not what they are or what they do.

This is a community where people live, work, learn and play in celebration of life’s beauty. A place where connections between people, nature and the arts are nourished.

Quality of Life

The best reason to live here is the life here.

Serenbe residents value a slower pace of living. Community is important, as is minimal mental stress and optimal physical health. It’s a laid-back lifestyle just 40 minutes from a major urban center and one plane ride away from the capitals of the world.

At Serenbe, there are gourmet restaurants in your backyard, stables full of horses you can ride along miles of trails and nationally known artists exhibiting in galleries across the street.

Our community is engaged and alive with outdoor performances, films, lectures and readings with friends, neighbors and notable visitors.

Mindful architectural elements, like central post boxes and porches that connect to the street, foster community and create a strong social fabric. Everything is within walking distance and the world waits along the edges.

Biophilia

The innate human instinct to connect with nature and other living beings.

Biophilia is more than preserving land as greenspace and creating an expansive nature trail network. There are 12 planning and design elements that make up Serenbe's Biophilic Principles, which achieve four keys to saving the planet: personal wellbeing, community engagement, national security, and global balance.

The development plan for Serenbe calls for multiple hamlets based on English villages, all designed on sacred geometry principles with buildings clustered along serpentine-like omega forms fitted to the undulations of the land. This method of arranging the community requires minimal land disturbances and allows the community to reserve large areas of undeveloped green space. Specifically, 70% of the total land will be placed into conservation while we build on the remaining 30% in dense walkable clusters.

We conserve energy by facilitating geothermal, solar and net zero homes. We conserve water with native and edible landscaping and naturally treating our wastewater for reuse as irrigation. We value nature, our children, our elders and our planet.

We have taken a new look at community development, and have based every facet of Serenbe’s design on common sense solutions and the principles of environmental sustainability. These principles touch everything from methods of construction and certification to the organic produce grown at Serenbe Farms.

Some elements of this design are obvious, while others are subtle or even unseen. Serenbe land planning protects the wetlands and historic zoning preserves the majority of the land as green space, with respect for the agricultural history of Chattahoochee Hill Country.

Wellness

Fresh air, fresh food and a supportive community.

At Serenbe, we believe a community is a living part of its natural surroundings, not something to be built at nature's expense. We believe in biophilia—the theory that there is an instinctive bond between humans and other living systems.

We need nature in our lives today more than ever. We need fresh air, fresh food, trees and grass around us. We need a place to grow and restore—a place to foster deep connections and connect with living systems.

Serenbe Farms and our extensive nature trails are at the center of our health and wellbeing. Through our three farm-to-table restaurants, local CSA (community supported agriculture) program and weekly farmer’s market, our residents enjoy the freshest produce and world-class culinary experiences.

Homes and hamlets are connected by looping country roads and a network of well-worn footpaths that make walking easier than driving. At Serenbe, wellness is an everyday activity.

The community at Serenbe feeds our residents in more ways than one. We’ve created a place where people are drawn together over gardening, cooking, books, art, ideas, and even over back fences.