If you've driven down South Main Street in Newtown lately, you've noticed the old Taunton Press campus doesn't look much like a publishing house anymore. On Thursday, the developers and their bank cut the ribbon on Taunton Residences at Deep Brook, an 83-apartment community that's already leasing and is expected to be completely finished by the end of the year.
That's a fast turnaround. The developer, Taunton Woods LLC, bought the 13-acre property at 63 S. Main St. for cash in July 2025. About 15 months later, the $32.02 million project is close to the finish line, as Westfair Business Journal reported this week.
Taunton Woods is led by Phillip Clark, Clayton Fowler, Edmund McGill and Rakesh Vali. Clark founded Claris Design-Build, and his firm is the general contractor. That's a setup a lot of us know well: when the builder is also one of the owners, decisions get made quickly and the schedule tends to stay tight. Fowler brings nearly 40 years in acquisition and development and has led the creation of more than 7,500 housing units.
Half old, half new
What makes this job interesting from a builder's point of view is that it's two kinds of work on one site. The campus used to have three buildings. One existing building was converted into 41 apartments, about 6,000 square feet of amenity space and 8,000 square feet of offices. All of that office space is being leased to Claris Design, a regional design firm. The other 42 apartments are in a brand-new three-story residential building.
So the crews here handled adaptive reuse, with all the surprises that come with opening up an older commercial building, right alongside a ground-up residential building. Anyone who's done both knows they call for different estimating habits, and they take a lot of attention to sequencing when they share a site.
The apartments range from studios and one-bedrooms to one-bedroom-plus-den and two-bedroom units. Listings on Realtor.com show rents starting around $2,125 a month. Seventeen of the 83 units, or 20%, are set aside as affordable housing meant for the local workforce.
How the money came together
Financing is where this one stands out. Most of it is a $22.5 million construction-to-permanent loan from Union Savings Bank, meaning one loan carries the project from groundbreaking through to long-term ownership instead of a construction loan followed by a separate refinance. Another $2,125,000 comes through the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority's Build 4 CT program.
"Our ability to efficiently structure a loan that covers both the heavy lifting of construction and the stability of permanent financing was critical to moving this project forward," Clark said.
Union Savings Bank President and CEO Chelen Reyes said the bank was proud to back a project that "honors the history of the Taunton Press campus" while meeting Newtown's need for housing and commercial space. She said the single-source loan gives the developer "the seamless financial transition required to bring a complex, mixed-use project from groundbreaking to long-term stabilization." U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal joined bank officials and the development team for the celebration.
That's not just banker talk. On a typical job, the switch from a construction loan to permanent financing is one more place where things can stall. When one loan covers both, the developer isn't waiting on a refinance to close out, and that tends to mean steadier draws and fewer headaches for the people swinging hammers.
What I like about this one is that it reuses a site that was already built out. The old publishing campus already had buildings and a Main Street address, and now it will hold 83 apartments and a fully leased office.
Why it matters for Contractors
There are three takeaways for anyone building in Fairfield County. First, older office and industrial campuses like this one can be turned into housing, often as a mix of conversion and new construction, and those jobs need contractors who can do both well. Second, financing tools like construction-to-permanent loans and CHFA's Build 4 CT gap money are helping mid-size projects get to the starting line faster, which means more work for builders and subs who can keep pace. Third, design-build firms that also hold an ownership stake are moving from purchase to grand opening in well under two years. If you sub on these jobs, expect a tight schedule and plan your crews to match.