For six generations, the Freeland family has been thriving in Southwest Florida. Ben Freeland wants to continue that tradition by redeveloping Moss Marina and rebranding it as Arches Bayfront on the bayside of Fort Myers Beach.
The idea to transform the 4.5-acre site from boat storage sheds into boutique hotels, restaurants and retail began percolating even before Hurricane Ian slammed into the area Sept. 28. After the hurricane wiped out about 6,000 waterfront area hotel rooms, the idea accelerated over the past six months, Freeland said.
“We were looking at what we wanted to do pre-hurricane,” Freeland said. “The hurricane changed everything in a day. We’ve been here a long time, and we have a great piece of property that’s made for this. We’re in the perfect spot for redevelopment.”
He would have to get the land rezoned by Town of Fort Myers Beach to be allowed to build up to 400 hotel rooms. Freeland envisions having two to three concepts with boutique-style hotels similar to those managed by the Kessler Collection in St. Augustine and Savannah, Georgia. 
Freeland’s company hired DPZ CoDesign architectural firm to help envision the future of the property at 450 Harbor Court on the southwest side of the Matanzas Pass bridge.
“Everything went from a five-year plan to a today plan,” said Freeland, a 1983 Cypress Lake High School graduate. “A lot of outside developers are coming in and thinking about what they’re going to do.”
Freeland, who operates several car dealerships in and around his current residence of Nashville, Tennessee, wants to give it a shot himself. He has a bit of a head start, with most of the land already in his family’s possession for more than 50 years.
Freeland held a public workshop Friday at Pink Shell Beach Resort & Marina that drew the attention of Fort Myers Beach Mayor Dan Allers.
“It’s encouraging [that] people want to invest on Fort Myers Beach,” Allers said just before a PowerPoint presentation of Arches Bayside. “Right after Ian, everything was an unknown, but now we’re on a pretty clear trajectory. Now, we get to see what it’s going to look like.”
Galina Tachieva led an eight-person team of architects from DPZ CoDesign, which has offices in Miami, Washington, D.C., Portland, Oregon, and Yauco, Puerto Rico.
Tachieva presided over a week-long charrette, a French term meaning when architects brainstorm during intense design sessions. She revealed the final drafts of the concept during the Friday public forum, with renderings showing arches integrated into the architecture and a public-access pedestrian path along the bayfront.
“We want to integrate the local history as much as we can,” Tachieva said, referring to the name of the project itself, as a pair of stone and coquina arches once welcomed visitors to Fort Myers Beach from 1924 until they were removed in 1979 to build the Matanzas Pass bridge. 
“We are trying to create a continuous linear park,” she said.
The goal is to create a walkable, bikeable development that integrates the bayside hotel development with Times Square and the rest of the beach.”
Freeland also enlisted traffic expert Rick Hall of Hall Planning & Engineering. Narrow streets, street trees, sidewalks, on-street parking, lower traffic speeds, small block size and buildings fronting the street all would help to create the walkable concept, said Hall, who was on hand to assist Tachieva’s team during its charrette.
“We put together a world-class team to do this,” Freeland said. “We want to do it right. We want to do it in an appropriate way that’s walkable and friendly.”
