The fantasy film “Willow” starring Val Kilmer lived somewhere in his brain at the time, and Green remembers getting off on the Willow Avenue exit of the Crosstown Expressway. Brandon was never a cultural mecca of the Bay area, and Green’s single mom didn’t get a lot of opportunities to take her kids someplace with history. This was a time when Cactus Club was a center of social life in Hyde Park Village, and guys walked around in Structure carpenter jeans. Nearby were historic homes not just near the village but in surrounding pockets like Spanishtown Creek. The warm memories of being with his family in that neighborhood never left—but Green knew he would never make enough money to live there.
That was until years and years later when he and wife Bianca were randomly driving around and found themselves at an empty lot on the corner of S Orleans Avenue and W Azeele Street.
“We find this random little pocket that is completely not nice, right? Rundown homes, abandoned homes. It was kind of like this bizarro world, and for one we were like, ‘Where are we? How does this exist in Hyde Park?’,” Green told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “And for two, we thought ‘We might be able to afford this little corner property with nothing on it.’”
So they made an offer. Others, including developers looking to build duplexes, did, too, and the home buying tango ensued. But red tape is hard to navigate, and eventually, Green convinced the seller to just let him get the sale and process over the finish line.
“I’m not a developer trying to take advantage of the land. I want to live here. So if you take my offer,we will make the closing date contingent on getting it through the variance. I’ll walk it through myself, pay for that process and deal with it,’” he said about his argument. “We want to live here.”
Here, as it turns out, was one of Tampa’s forgotten Black neighborhoods, Dobyville.
Named for long-time resident Richard Doby, the historic boundaries of Dobyville are roughly “North Willow (at Fig Street), south to Swann, west to South Albany, north to Kennedy, east to Rome, north to Fig, and back east to North Willow,” according to the Tampa Tribune. The same report cited a 1927 study which found that approximately 10% percent of Black Tampeños called Dobyville home during the 1920s.Much of the neighborhood’s history, from its schools, restaurants and Mt. Zion AME Church, are all now just memories, replaced by residential construction and the expressway that cut through the neighborhood in the ‘70s. Save for a few historic structures and restored homes, Dobyville’s historic nature can be hard to see today.
When Green paid $125,000 for a lot in 2013, and another $125,000 for the one next to it a year later, he didn’t know the history of Dobyville—but it was literally outside his door (the historic home of Richard Doby is literally 200 feet away). And he dove in, getting to know neighbors who’d lived across the street for generations. Soon, Green, who founded his company Aadmixx (stylized in all-caps) shortly after moving in, came to feel a lot of the resentment about how the city had treated such a special place.
His reverence and admiration of the neighborhood is why Green—who holds a master’s in architecture & community design—took his time designing the home that now sits at 400 S Orleans Ave.
Green had no roadblocks building his house or the nearby Strata Barn townhome because there were no restrictions at the time.
Still, there is nothing arbitrary in the space dubbed “400 Sola.” It is modern in every way and stands in contrast to the dwellings around it. The foyer was designed around one of his favorite pieces of art, “Party Store” by the Tampa artist BASK (whose touch is also on the exterior). A 14-foot-window in the entryway was drafted so that anyone inside could admire the oak tree on the edge of the lot.
Now Green wants to talk about how allowing for more modern architecture within the City of Tampa’s historic overlays can ensure that neighborhoods aren’t overrun with bad, lazy, and cheap architecture.
The City of Tampa says its overlay districts are meant “to allow for the application of specific regulations” in distinct geographic areas that warrant special consideration “due to a unique situation or practical difficulties resulting from the historic development pattern.”
Green’s conversation starts tonight, Wednesday, June 25, at 6:30 p.m. in the second floor auditorium of Hyde House Public Studio. That’s where he will give a presentation on modern residential architecture in historic Hyde Park and showcase work of students in a tropical architecture course taught at the University of South Florida by Michael Halflants.
Halflants—an Associate Professor at USF’s School of Architecture and a principal at Halflants + Pichette Architects with offices in Tampa and Sarasota—taught Green over 20 years ago. This summer, he brought his former student in to help as his latest pupils spent six weeks designing single-family homes suited for tropical climes.
The work in front of a jury this week at Hyde House is part of a design challenge for the students who were tasked with developing hyper-realistic digital models representing the historically significant architectural aesthetic of Hyde Park.
“The goal is to plug each students design into the model to produce high level renderings that will exemplify how modern leaning residential design can (and should) be welcomed to coexist within the historical context of the neighborhood (specifically here in Dobyville where history has left a lot of unfortunate lots in disrepair),” Green wrote in a social media post about the event. “Good design, regardless of its era, can indeed live in beautiful harmony when it’s done with passion and integrity.”
“The reason people have such a scared view of modern architecture is because there’s a lot of bad examples of it,” Green said.
Even with a budget just under $1 million, the fees between builders and architects all working on drawings, construction and more start to add up. “That’s another $100,000-$120,000, that is hard to swallow, understandably, for custom design,” he added.
“Because of that, people hire baseline draftsmen with no architectural degree or training and just ask for a floor plan for whatever the latest buzzword is,” Green noted. “And now that modern has caught on, 90% of what you see around this town is modern bullshit, it sucks—I call it ‘developer modern.’’”
Whether or not the city will go with him on that idea of progress, remains to be seen.
Tampa Councilman Bill Carlson, whose District 4 includes Dobyville, has worked with the community to create an overlay that would protect the historic nature of Dobyville, and he acknowledges Green’s good ideas on how to integrate tasteful modern buildings in historic communities throughout Tampa. The two have had ongoing conversations to just listen to each other. “He’s a great designer, a big visionary. The question is, ‘Where would it be best to put those kinds of houses?” Carlson told CL.
While Green has argued for preserving what is truly both historical and significant in the neighborhood, he says that modern residential architecture—when executed with an honest design process, quality materials and genuine integrity—can coexist beautifully with historic homes.
“The people in the people in Dobyville, and the families of the people that lived there, would have to weigh in on what would happen in Dobyville,” Carlson added. “But his other overall idea of building tasteful modern homes is a good one, because we need more of that somewhere in the city.”
Linda Saul-Sena, who served as a Tampa City Councilwoman (including stint as chairwoman) on and off in the ‘90s and early-2000s, is more explicit and told CL that the appropriate way is to build within the existing overlay guidelines when it comes to setbacks, materials and more. The small size of Dobyville, she said, makes it easy to say “No thank you” the idea of tweaking the rules.
“Build it somewhere else in town where there’s not a delicate historic fabric that you want to reinforce,” Saul-Sena (a CL columnist, in full disclosure), added.
Green told CL that he agrees with historic preservation on a lot of lines, but doesn’t believe that a house’s born-on date makes it worth preserving. “There are a lot of houses that have that born on date, but they have awful, awful renovations that have been done to them over the decades,” he said.
Still, bringing that change to Dobyville will be an uphill battle.
“I don’t think Dobyville should be the laboratory,” Patrick Cimino told CL about Green’s ideas.
Cimino, a past Vice-President of Historic Hyde Park Neighborhood Association, has not always seen eye-to-eye with Green, but loves the fact that he exists in a town where developers seem to be royalty. “It’s nice having somebody who thinks creatively,” Cimino said, complimenting what Green’s done at 400 Sola.
“I support people like him, even though I don’t agree with him sometimes,” Cimino added. “He has a lot of good intention and ideas—and he doesn’t want to pave paradise.”
And at the end of the day, that’s what Green hopes to start talking about with anyone who’ll listen—saving the paradise that is Tampa.
“Preserve the old stuff that’s worth preserving. Save what’s truly significant. That which has indeed stood the test of time and still resembles itself as it stood in its prime. That’s important,” Green wrote in an unpublished blog post.
Progress is not as simple as the reckless cliche, “out with the old, in with the new,” Green wrote.
“Historical significance should be preserved,” he added. “But how we define it needs to be revisited, redefined, and revived.”
UPDATED 06/25/25 2:06 p.m. Updated with a link to the City of Tampa municode about historic overlays, and to move part of a story about the construction of Green’s home and Strata Bard townhome higher in the story.
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This article appears in Jun 19-25, 2025.