Hilton Head Monthly Magazine

The Lowcountry is home to a number of businesses that started on local grounds, but have expanded upwards and outwards to open locations outside of their Beaufort County homelands. Here are just a few.

The Cypress: Continued caring

If those pesky winters weren’t quite so long, Cypress Group founding president Jim Coleman says he’d open another Cypress continuing-care retirement community in his beloved Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

“But it’s a little too seasonal here,” Coleman said from his mountain retreat in Blowing Rock, N.C. “You know THE blowing rock? I’m looking out at it right now. But I had to put on a sweater this morning.”

Coleman and his partner, Marc Puntereri, started The Cypress of Hilton Head in 1992 and have since opened high-end continuing care communities in Charlotte, Chapel Hill, (where Coleman graduated from UNC) and Raleigh. (The Chapel Hill community is called The Cedars.)

But when he first launched The Cypress of Hilton Head, Coleman didn’t foresee the success of the company outside of Beaufort County. “I had been involved with other developments, including Hilton Head Plantation, Indigo Run, Main Street and a few golf courses, but I realized that the continuing-care retirement field was enjoyable, so I shifted my focus” he says.

Coleman joined the Sea Pines Company in 1972 and became a senior vice president for Hilton Head Plantation; later, he joined a group that formed the Melrose Company on Daufuskie Island. In 1988, he ran with a germinating idea for a luxury, resident-owned continuing-care retirement community in Hilton Head Plantation, and The Cypress was born.

Coleman said one the keys to The Cypress Group’s success are location, top-notch employees — about 250 at each community — and good timing in the housing market. The communities are unique in the wide range of housing options they offer — from apartments and villas to cottages and waterfront bungalows — plus on-site medical facilities that offer rehabilitative and long-term care programs, short-term recuperation and respite services.

He believes the company will continue growing, depending on the housing markets. That’s because the Cypress model, Coleman says, provides seniors with unparalleled lifestyles, wellness and health-care alternatives, recreation, clubhouses, social and cultural activities and independence in some of the South’s most beautiful and culturally vibrant locations. Residents own their own homes, and myriad financial options are available. And, of course, in the end the company is helping people. “I like this business immensely. It’s extremely rewarding,” he says.    Mark Kreuzwieser