Building
the Dream
The Irvine Company’s luxurious custom home
districts of Ocean Ridge and the Pelicans – Hill, Crest and Point – are opulent
and diverse. Most would call that success, but is it according to plan?
By
Terence Loose
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ong before the first homes of Newport Coast came out of the
ground, Donald Bren, The Irvine Company chairman,
looked at the quiet hills between Corona del Mar and Laguna and – unlike the
rest of us, who saw only fields of mustard plants rippling in the gentle summer
breeze – envisioned a community inspired by the age old villas of the
Mediterranean coast. He saw a coastal enclave with the old-world charm and
warmth of
Overseeing the custom home building in all of
Clients come in for one or more “Design Workshops,” the goal
of which is for participants to get familiar with each other and share
concepts. This is the time that “the better architects will come in with
sketches,” says the DAC’s resident landscape
architect, Lauren Roy. “The poorer ones will come in with drawings already
done. They don’t want to work together with us. We’re looking for architects
who actually include us in the process.”
Next, drawings are submitted and the design is looked at in
detail. Subjects such as window size, roof lines and height, color pallets, and
a long list of other specifics come up. It can get contentious, but for the
most part tempers run cool, say the DAC members. “It seems like there’s a
perception on the street that people coming through this process are facing an
inquisition and the guillotine,” says DAC member Dave Cattanach.
“But the chatter is coming from the minority; the majority would say they’re
facing reasonable people and a reasonable process.”
It is true that only a handful of custom home lot buyers have
walked away, choosing not to build and relinquishing their lots. Also true is
that there’s a long history of give and take in the small, sketch-strewn room
of the DAC. It’s a process that has had to adapt to the rapidly changing times
since Newport Coast’s inception in the early 90s, as is evidenced by the
diversity – yes, I said diversity – of the custom homes on the hill.
Pelican Hill
It’s not clear when Bren saw his
vision – media shy, he lets his developments speak for him – but planning and
entitlement issues for the
But the early 90s were not the surest of times; the country
was in recession and many questioned The Irvine Company’s wisdom in launching a
high-end planned community, not to mention counting on millions for nothing
more than dirt and the promise of a tony
neighborhood.
But the millionaires came in greater numbers than anyone had
suggested; Pelican Hill (along with Pelican Point’s 55 lots) was a success. In
fact, the custom home lot sales carried the company through those early years.
In the end, however, the success did come at a price. To this day, the custom
homes of Pelican Hill stray most from the Tuscan hillside dream Bren had so many years before. “The economy was one reason
you see such a wide range of styles in Pelican Hill,” says DAC architect Dan Lueras. “We wanted things to come out of the ground so
people would have faith in the community.” This is nothing unusual; buyers
naturally find more confidence when others have jumped in before.
But it did mean that those first buyers had a little more
leverage when submitting plans to the committee for review and a green light.
The weak economy affected the buyers’ decision-making also. Bren assumed that because of the prices paid for dirt and
the scope of the custom homes, homebuyers would hire only bluechip
architects. That didn’t always happen. A few builders were more concerned with
the bottom line than the aesthetic one and the DAC became something of a school
in Tuscan architecture.
It wasn’t all the architects’ faults, however. “In
architecture school you learn contemporary,” says one of the area’s most
respected architects, Carlos Elenes of EBTA
Architects. “We’re told we should be cutting edge and are discouraged from
borrowing from the past. But even when you’re drawing contemporary, you’re just
borrowing from a more recent time.”
To learn the rustic styles of the coastal
Still, for all of the above reasons as well as a few others,
such as many sloping and oddly-shaped lots, Pelican Hill is now home to some of
the most diverse architecture in
In fact, there are a few homes in Pelican Hill that could be
seen as slightly modern; definitely nothing you’d see looking out on the Med of
yester-year. “Pelican Hill has a lot of slightly modern houses that [got
through] when we tried to work with people,” says Cattanach.
“There is some exposed concrete and one copper-roofed home.”
The copper-roofed home also features a back of wall-to-wall
glass in order to take advantage of the panoramic view. “They defended it by
saying it was good architecture and it fit the topography. Which was all true,”
says Senior Director of the Residential Custom Lot Program Jennifer Henry.
Still, it opened up the floodgates to those who followed and made it difficult
for the DAC to draw their Tuscan line.
Pelican Crest
By the time Pelican Crest’s first 61 (of an eventual 166)
custom home lots were brought to market in mid 1996, the economy was starting
to rebound, builders and architects had gained familiarity with coastal
Mediterranean styles and, most important, Pelican Hill and Pelican Point were a
resounding success –
nearly 90 percent of the lots offered from ‘91 to ‘96 had sold,
totaling nearly $230 million in sales for The Irvine Company.
This allowed The Irvine Company to tighten up the guidelines
and push for a more authentic nod to Tuscan estates. “Pelican Crest is where we
really started asking architects to support their designs with authentic
architecture from historic pieces,” says Cattanach.
“We felt the experiment at Pelican Hill had gone a little too far.”
The other dramatic difference that came with Pelican Crest
was the terrain. With Pelican Hill, the sloping lots fostered imaginative, more
diverse architecture but also led to view disputes and unusable land. “The
sales staff had a fear of selling more sloping lots,” says Henry. “So we ended
up flattening a lot of the lots.” This led to lowering the height limit – from
35-feet in parts of Pelican Hill to Pelican Crest’s 26 feet – and creating
plateaus with rows of homes.
The result is that from a distance, Pelican Crest’s rows of
multi-million dollar homes can take on a slightly sub-division look. To battle this the DAC insists on mature landscaping on all sides of
the homes. As the DAC’s
While the “king-of-the-hill” views fired sales, they also
inflamed the one area of contention that has consistently plagued the
“If [owners] really had their way, you’d have a Tuscan villa
in front and a glass greenhouse on the back,” says Cattanach.
David Hohmann, a respected local architect who did
one of the first homes on the hill, agrees that the biggest challenge he sees
with his clients stems from the view issue, and how to
blend the contemporary with the historic and regional. “But [the DAC] really
works to find solutions,” he says. “A common one is to hide the wall of glass
in the shadow of a loggia, so the integrity of the design is saved but the
homeowner has their view.” This, he says, most of his clients understand as
good for all. It gives them what they want and protects them from neighbors
stepping outside the guidelines.
But they still try. “Human nature is such that people want to
get as much as they can,” says Homer C. Oatman, DAC
chairman. And the process is a negotiation, so it stands to reason that there’s
some gamesmanship involved. Sure, says Oatman,
“Sometimes they want to play poker with you. But we have a great working report
with the best architects, there’s a lot of mutual respect.”
After Pelican Hill, however, the board has adhered to the
stricter guidelines a little more adamantly. “People [are] constantly trying to
do something different, something more, and we have to go back and rein it in,
tighten it up,” says Oatman.
And while Pelican Crest, phase one and two, has been another
undeniable success (only 16 lots remain for sale) with many award-winning
homes, some feel that the community became a bit too homogenous – that Newport
Coast as a whole didn’t develop entirely in the direction anticipated by The
Irvine Company, and that the idea of a quaint Tuscan hillside was overtaken by
a monied and ostentatious crowd.
Shady Canyon
This faction will embrace the more rural architectural
guidelines of
Paradoxically, the guidelines are both more restrictive and
more encouraging of creativity than on the hill, say DAC members. “We learned
something from [Pelican Hill, Pelican Crest and Pelican Crest Two] and we’ve
translated that into
Depth they have, but
The board plans to be specific in materials and details such
as windows, shutters and roof shapes, so it is clear what the style is but,
says Cattanach, “there are
infinite possibilities on how it goes together. Even if you look back to
classical architecture, Greek and Roman, there is a vocabulary and order of
proportions for the way things work together. But they created a number of
different buildings, from the Acropolis to the Coliseum, all from the same kit
of parts. The analogy applies here. There are no restrictions on imagination
and how you assemble the parts.”
Another aspect of
One concern the DAC had was how the more popular architects
of
Which brings up a sticky point. Just as it was hard to say no to the millionaires stepping
forward in the early 90s to gamble on Pelican Hill, how is it any easier at
Crystal Cove
Probably the biggest challenge the DAC faces is realizing The
Irvine Company’s vision for the custom lots at Crystal Cove. The last, and
arguably some of the most anticipated, custom lots planned for the
Just as the DAC members took what they learned at
Odds are it will be impressive, but as with great
architecture, only time will tell. þ