Walk the cobblestone breezeway at the Clubhouse toward the Steakhouse and you pass under a three-story wine tower stocked floor to ceiling with bottles, plus 124 private lockers where members store their own collections. Ask about renting one and you'll be told to expect a six-month wait. A few hundred yards south, on the edge of the same 1,600-acre master plan, sits 65 acres of graded, empty land that a Dallas developer first proposed building on back in 2021. Five years later, it still doesn't have a start date.
That gap between what Flying Horse has actually finished and what it's still promising is the real story of the neighborhood this year. The finished parts have picked up national recognition. The unfinished part is legally cleared to move forward and financially stuck anyway.
The Clubhouse's Actual Report Card
If you've eaten at the Steakhouse at Flying Horse recently, you've eaten at a restaurant with real hardware to show for it. The restaurant holds the DiRōNA Award for both 2025 and 2026, a distinction reserved for North America's most distinguished dining rooms, and it has picked up Wine Spectator's Best of Award of Excellence every year from 2023 through 2026. That's not a one-time nod. It's a four-year run judged annually on the completeness and depth of the wine list, which at the Steakhouse runs into the hundreds of labels with particular strength in California, France, and Italy.
Next door, the space formerly known as La Fortezza has been reworked into Fortezza Italiana, a contemporary Italian kitchen serving breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a daily happy hour. It's open to the public and to Resort guests, not just Club members, which matters if you live inside Flying Horse but haven't joined the Club. You don't need a membership to get a weekday breakfast within a five-minute drive of your own driveway.
The wine tower itself has become something of a landmark on its own. Flying Horse's director of food and beverage has described the demand for those 124 storage lockers as consistent enough that the resort hosts private tastings throughout the year just to help members fill the space they've reserved. That's a small detail, but it tells you something larger: the amenities that were built years ago aren't coasting. They're still earning their keep.
Flying Horse North's Quiet Climb
The Weiskopf-designed course at the Main clubhouse gets most of the local attention because it's the one members walk out their back door to play. Flying Horse North, the second 18-hole course a short drive away in the Black Forest pines, has spent the last three years building a reputation that doesn't depend on proximity.
Golfweek's Best rankings for Top 200 Residential Golf Courses in the U.S. show a steady move up the list:
| Year | Flying Horse North rank |
|---|---|
| 2024 | #109 |
| 2025 | #102 |
| 2026 | #94 |
That's a 15-spot climb over two ranking cycles, and 2026 marks the third consecutive year the course has appeared on the list at all. For a course that opened well after the Weiskopf original and still runs on member and Resort-guest tee times only, that trajectory says the second course has stopped being an afterthought in anyone's mind but the calendar's.
The 65 Acres That Won't Move
Here's the part of the story most residents only know in fragments, usually from driving past the same undeveloped stretch near Highway 83 and New Life Drive for years without seeing a foundation poured.
In 2021, Stillwater Capital of Dallas partnered with Classic Companies, the builder behind most of Flying Horse, to propose what they called Downtown Flying Horse: a mixed-use development on the community's southern edge combining retail, office space, and several types of housing around a shared open space. The Colorado Springs Gazette's coverage at the time described early plans for up to 1,500 residences, 800,000 square feet of office space, and as much as 300,000 square feet of commercial space including a grocery store, all organized around 3.5 acres of central open space and a two-lane internal road built to feel more like an established downtown street than a new subdivision.
That proposal got tangled almost immediately in a dispute with Flying Horse's own metropolitan districts over who would control the operating and maintenance funds the project would eventually generate. The fight ran for years. It was resolved when a judge ruled decisively in the developer's favor, clearing the district boundary questions that had been holding the project back on paper.
You'd think that would mean shovels soon. It doesn't. Flying Horse's own community news post on the ruling puts the estimated build-out value of the project at $500 million to $1 billion once complete, and then states plainly that given current interest rate and construction cost conditions, there is still no definitive start date. The legal obstacle is gone. The financial one isn't.
For residents, that means the 65 acres you drive past are neither dead nor imminent. They're in the specific limbo of a project that's fully entitled and fully unbuilt, which is a different thing than either "cancelled" or "coming soon," and worth knowing the difference.
What Already Works Without It
The instructive part of putting these two stories next to each other is what it reveals about how Flying Horse actually functions day to day. None of what makes a Saturday here work depends on Downtown Flying Horse getting built.
A typical weekend inside the community already stitches together without it:
- Coffee and breakfast at Fortezza Italiana before the Clubhouse fills up
- A stop at the North Gate King Soopers for groceries on the way to a soccer field
- An afternoon at Barefoot Park, which has the playground, sports fields, and splash pad that do a lot of the heavy lifting for families with young kids
- Errands at the Shoppes at Flying Horse retail corner
- A tee time on the Weiskopf course at home, or the ten-minute drive north to Flying Horse North for a completely different round in the pines
That routine was built out of amenities that already exist and, in the Steakhouse's case, keep collecting outside validation for it. The 65 acres were always meant to add density and a second commercial hub to that picture, not replace the one that's already working. Whatever happens with Downtown Flying Horse eventually, it's additive. The neighborhood's daily rhythm isn't waiting on it to feel complete.
That's worth sitting with if you've lived here long enough to have opinions about when, or whether, that empty stretch of land finally breaks ground. The honest answer, based on what Flying Horse's own materials say, is that nobody currently has that date either. What you can count on is the part that already has three consecutive years of national rankings and four consecutive years of wine awards behind it, and that part isn't going anywhere.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own home's value, or you're curious how a corridor like this shows up in comparable sales across northern Colorado Springs, the team at The Johnson Team can walk you through what the current market actually shows, whenever you're ready for that conversation.
