New Irvine Co. Plan for Coastal Development Wins Some Praise

The Irvine Co.’s newest proposal to put homes, hotels and golf courses on the most extensive stretch of vacant coastal land left in Orange County won both praise and warnings of possible objections Thursday.

“At first glance it looks as though there could be some positive things” in the new plan, said Fern Pirkle, president of Friends of the Irvine Coast, which battled the Irvine Co. in court over its original plan.

The company’s scrapping of its proposal for 10-story office buildings along Coast Highway “will surely go a long way to meeting a lot of the objections that we had,” Pirkle said.

Development of the prime real estate had been mired in controversy for a decade when the company won county and state approval in 1981 for its original proposal.

Despite the approvals, the Irvine Co. agreed to withdraw the plan and come up with a new design for 9,400 acres along a 2.5-mile stretch between Laguna Beach and Corona del Mar after objections by Friends of the Irvine Coast, an organization of about 2,000 people, and others.

The company’s agreement to redraw its plans came after Donald Bren assumed control of the company in 1983. It was one of several moves the firm, the largest private landowner in the county, took to improve relations with neighbors and tenants of its vast properties.

“We’ve redesigned the plan in response to the community’s desire for greater emphasis on open space and our feelings that the plan could be done better,” said Roger Seitz, vice president of urban planning and design.

Seitz was hired by the company two years ago, when officials began discussing revisions of the development to turn the northern section of the property into a major “destination resort.”

The company said its new plan for the property, known as the Irvine Coast, will leave 75% of the land as open space, rather than the original plan’s 60%.

Instead of the office buildings, which drew the most fire from opponents of the original plan, there will be two golf courses of 18 holes each on the inland side of Coast Highway. The courses will overlook the highway and Crystal Cove State Park at the water’s edge.

The new plan envisions 2,150 hotel rooms instead of 1,750, with 1,900 of them in three areas around the 436-acre golf courses nestled against Pelican Hill. Although the document submitted to the county did not say how high the hotels would be, it said the areas “will be limited as to building height and site coverage.”

A separate company statement said each hotel area would maintain “a Mediterranean feeling.”

“It’s hard to think of Mediterranean-type architecture as being more than three or four stories high,” Pirkle said. That height would be agreeable to her group. But she expressed concern about the large number of hotel rooms and the traffic they are likely to generate.

One solution to traffic problems will be the company’s building of a $15-million, 6.5-mile Pelican Hill Road connecting Coast Highway and Bonita Canyon Road that the company said will serve as a bypass around Corona del Mar.

The company plans to build the same number of homes, 2,593, on the property, but because of the increase in the amount of land designated as open space the homes will on a smaller area and grouped in clusters.

Still, there will be opportunities for the well-heeled to spend their money.

There will be up to 85 homes on the slopes of Wishbone Hill, toward the southern end of the property, on lot sizes ranging from 16,500 square feet to 10 acres. At the northern end of the property, adjacent to Cameo Shores, the number of homes proposed has been cut from 215 to 76.

The company said that in addition to the single-family home lots, there will be multiple-family buildings and housing for moderate-income residents.

Pirkle and Peter Herman, an assistant to Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, whose district contains the development, said they hoped to have the company give land that will not be developed to the county at the start of building, rather than a little at a time as development proceeds.

The company’s new plans must win county and state Coastal Commission approval before development can begin.