Hourglass District

The Hourglass District is the neighborhood that does the Thornton Park comparison unfavorably in articles, but the people who live here would tell you it's the better deal. The commercial core — Hourglass Brewing's forty-two-tap taproom, Foxtail Coffee, F&D Woodfired Italian, and the Curry Ford West corridor stretching a mile and a half east through Pizza Bruno, Le Ky Patisserie, Claddagh Cottage, and a dozen other independent operators — is a James Beard-adjacent food scene in a residential setting. The City of Orlando designated Curry Ford West a Main Street District in 2018, and the developer who built the commercial node committed $170 million in additional investment in 2024 including seventy-four townhomes and a mixed-use building. That is a developer who named the district investing $170 million because they believe in what comes next — a forward signal that is unusually legible.

The residential stock is 1920s through 1970s Florida bungalows and ranch homes on the streets off South Bumby, with the best original craftsman examples backing toward Hourglass Lake. The renovation math has worked here for a decade: a structurally sound 1960s ranch at entry-tier pricing, a thorough renovation, and a sale at the renovated-peer price produces a spread that still justifies the work. The buyer pool is primarily young professionals priced out of Thornton Park and Baldwin Park, healthcare workers at Orlando Health's main campus two miles north, and Boone High School families who want the same magnet program as Thornton Park families at a thirty to forty percent lower price per square foot. The cross-shop is exactly what it sounds like: Thornton Park for the buyer who has the budget and wants the brick streets and Lake Eola proximity, Hourglass for the buyer who wants the same independent-business-corridor lifestyle and the same school zone with meaningful cost savings.