ORANGE BEACH, Ala. — Architect Forrest Daniell has been involved in the Amber Isle planned unit development in Orange Beach for the better part of 10 years.

Now, after years of fits and starts and changes in plans for this restaurant or that hotel, dirt is flying, tools are whirring and machinery is rumbling on a 10-acre plot on the far west end of the city’s limits.

“I was not the original architect,” Daniell said. “They had someone on board that did a hotel at the very end of the site and a mixed use development in the middle.”

When he was brought in, the focus was on putting in a condo development.

“I did a design with condos and the mixed used in the middle and changed it up a little bit,” Daniell said. “And then the condo market died and they tried to do a hotel over there. We did a hotel and then the economy really went down and everything died for awhile.

“And it got resurrected in its current form.”

The current form, Daniell says, evolved around 2011 and 2012, but it wasn’t without controversy.

A Bob Marley-themed restaurant of more than 18,000 square feet was planned, but city leaders nixed that saying they did not want a music venue on land that was previously zoned residential. Local residents also lined up against having live music on the site.

“I don’t want to live across the street from the Hangout,” late Councilman Al Bradley, then a concerned citizen, said. His family owns a beach house across the street from the project.

Restaurateur Eddie Spence, who co-owns more than a dozen restaurants among them Shrimp Baskets, Mikee’s and The Steamer, eventually decided against the site for the Marley restaurant.

“We didn’t want to have to be hassled by people every time a little noise came out of the place,” Spence said at the time. “We didn’t get a ‘warm fuzzy.’”

But now, Daniell says, the plans are set in stone. The restaurant plan evolved into two separate eateries in the latest PUD approval, each being about 7,900 square feet.

Also planned for the parcel are a Ron Jon Surf Shop, and two hotels, one with 63 suites and one with 36 rooms. The 36-room facility will be atop the second restaurant.

Work has started on the western edge of the project where the first restaurant, a stand-alone building, and the surf shop are under construction. Wing Shack, an Alabama-based restaurant, will be at the west end and next to it will be the Ron Jon Surf shop.

“The Wing Shack and the Ron Jon right next door to it are supposed to be open around May of this year and are trying to get ready for the summer,” Daniell. “We’re about to submit for a foundation permit to start construction on the hotel Indigo.”

The Indigo will be on the east end of the project and the largest of the buildings on the site, four stories high and housing 63 suites and additional retail space.

“That one should start construction in the next week or so,” Daniell said. “Hotel Indigo has eight or 10,000 feet of retail attached to it on the east side.”

The last of the buildings will have a restaurant on the ground floor and four stories of hotel with 36 rooms above it.

“We’re currently in planning review with the planning commission and the city council for approval of that one,” Daniell said. “I think it’s going to be a White Sands Hotel, it’s going to be an unbranded hotel. It’s not going to have a flag on it.”

And the restaurant, which hasn’t been settled on as of earlier this week, will not raise any concerns in the neighborhood.

“I don’t know who the restaurant will be under the hotel, but whoever it will be will be noncontroversial,” he said. “No loud music, no noise, no nothing.”

Target date for opening the hotels is the spring of 2016.

Developers, including Mark Goldstein of New York, originally owned a 42-acre tract but donated 32 acres of that to Gulf State Park. The group also paid Orange Beach $250,000 in impact fees which will go to improving the Hugh S. Branyon Backcountry Trail and some of that has already included work at the Rosemary Dunes trailhead.

Various plans over the years have called for a 12-story Holiday Inn and two hotels, one a 12-story Wind Sands and a five-story Amber Isle. The PUD was first approved by the city in 2004 and after several alternations dirt finally began turning last year.