Developer makes his mark on Central Florida

Before he was building multi-million dollar projects across Central Florida, David Lamm built his first structures piece-by-piece by hand. Back in his hometown of Lakeland, he carefully crafted each wall, roof and floor to create doll-sized cabins out of Lincoln Logs.

That tinkering led to bigger things, like fastening together human-sized furniture and carpentry projects.

Today he’s made his mark on the landscape of Central Florida, helping dream together projects that have come to define the style of local communities. Now he’s in the middle of developing the hub of what will be Maitland’s redeveloped downtown, Maitland City Centre. The development will bring a 220-unit apartment building, 42,000-square-feet of retail space, a 503-space parking garage, and a 41-space surface parking lot to the long-blighted area across from Maitland’s city hall.

Since 2004 he’s done his dreaming out of Baldwin Park with the help of more than two-dozen partners – the employees of Lamm & Company Co. headquartered on Lake Baldwin Lane.

And each of those employees is a shareholder in the company, which evolved out of the first firm Lamm started on his own back in 1988 at age 25.

After majoring in architecture a the University of Florida, Lamm decided he liked being out in the field better than being behind a drawing board and dove head first into development.

“Nothing is ever the same,” he said. “Every job is different, and you have to be creative. Every day is a new challenge and it never gets boring.”

From blocks of office buildings, including his own, up and down Lake Baldwin Lane, to dorms on the Rollins College campus, religious buildings of nearly every sect imaginable, and new wards at the Winter Park Memorial Hospital, Lamm has had a hand in helping shape the Orlando area streetscape.

“It’s always fulfilling to drive by buildings and look at the historical relevance and think that something that we built could be there 100 years from now,” he said.

Some of his favorites include the colorful stained glass building just north of the Winter Park Farmers Market, and what was once the Millenia Art Gallery, which his team built from the ground up in a record 78 days to make it show-ready for an incoming exhibit of Chihuly glass.

When he’s not building buildings, he spends as much time outside of them as possible. Off the clock, you’re likely to find him out sailing the seas between here and the Bahamas, or hiking a mountain out west. While Lamm calls Baldwin Park home fulltime, part of his heart lives in a small mountain town on the other side of the country.

The first time Lamm visited Ennis, Mont., he felt like he was coming home. He found the town through a trip planned by the Downeast Orvis shop on Park Avenue to a dude ranch there 20 years ago, and then kept coming back.

“All the sudden you go to a place and you realize you’re homesick and you don’t want to leave,” Lamm said.

But coming home to Baldwin Park, he said, is always nice too.

“It’s a great quality of life to live and work in the same community,” he said.