Architect Revives Cul-de-Sac : ‘Pinwheel’ Land Plan Squeezes More Houses on Site

A land-planning concept that would seem to have everything going for it puts new life into the old cul-de-sac by yielding more houses per acre, minimizing the impact of cars, increasing the size of the rear yard and slashing development costs.

Architect Stewart Woodard of Stewart Woodard & Associates, A.I.A., Costa Mesa, believes that his so-called circular motor court layout has so many advantages over the traditional linear tract layout that it’s only a matter of time before it replaces the much more common linear layout.

“In the seven projects involving more than 2,000 housing units that we’ve designed for Orange County builders, we’ve achieved a 30% to 50% reduction in roads, doubled the amount of open space and doubled the amount of rear yard space--all while getting as much as 12 detached houses on an acre of land,” he said. “A big advantage of the circular motor court plan is that it works especially well on hilly sites. Increasingly, hilly land is all that is available for development in many communities.”

The circular layout accommodates apartments, townhouses and detached houses or--in the case of the 64.3-acre Canyon Hills in the Laguna Canyon area of Laguna Beach--a combination of all three in one 681-unit development that garnered a 1986 Gold Nugget Award from the Pacific Coast Builders Conference for the Woodard firm.

The Kaufman & Broad Home Corp. Canyon Hills development manages to accommodate 108 2-3-bedroom detached houses in a tract called California Cove, along with 573 attached units built by other developers. The price range of the detached houses was $146,000-$162,000 when the project opened in 1985, according to a K&B; spokeswoman.

Woodard used a similar configuration for K&B;’s California Terrace 95-unit detached development in Phillips Ranch near Diamond Bar. The 2-3-bedroom, 1,100-1,590-square-foot houses went on sale in May, 1987, in the $123,000-$159,000 range, according to the spokeswoman, Elene L. Davidson, and were sold out by March, 1988.

“The advantage of the pinwheel design is the bigger back yard compared with traditional linear layouts, along with getting more units on the same amount of land,” she said. “One disadvantage is the streetscape is dominated by garage doors, due to the pie-shaped lots with the narrow end facing the street.”

In addition to designing houses and tracts for K&B;, Woodard has designed motor court projects for such Southland builders as Sterling Homes, Ponderosa Homes, Urban West Development Co., M.D. Janes Co. and Hardage Enterprises.

“We’ve also designed a half dozen projects with more than 1,000 units in such Florida communities as Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa and Orlando,” Woodard said. “Florida builders face some of the same problems as those in California.”

The California dream for home buyers is a detached house on its own lot; to achieve this dream, California builders must squeeze as many houses on as small a parcel of typically expensive land as possible. The lots average about 3,500 square feet at the Laguna Beach K&B; development and are bigger--4,500 square feet--at the Phillips Ranch project.

Architect Walt Richardson of Richardson Nagy Martin in Newport Beach said that the typical 7,500-square-foot lot of only a few years ago is now considered a pad size for a half-million-dollar-plus move-up house. Most lots are now well under 6,000 feet, with 3,600-3,800-square-foot lots typical in such new developments as the Irvine Co.’s Westpark in Irvine.

“One of the first modern suburban uses of smaller lots was University Park in Irvine, where 5,000-square-foot lots were used two decades ago,” Richardson said. His firm won a Gold Nugget Award in 1987 from the Pacific Coast Builders Conference for the 4,500-unit Westpark site plan.

“Not only in California, but elsewhere in the nation, the ongoing problem for architects, planners and builders is putting a fairly big house--2,000 square feet or even larger--on a small lot,” Richardson said.

He outlined the problems and solutions in the February, 1988, issue of Urban Land magazine, published by the Urban Land Institute.

The Z-lot plan, so called because it has “Z” jogs in the lot lines for easements, gives an extra five feet or so to the front elevation of the house, allowing a front entry and diminishing the influence of the garage door, Richardson said.

Z-lots were used by Richardson’s firm for Promenade by J.M. Peters Co., a 170-house development in Westpark. It works out to a density of 7.75 units per acre with 3,780 square foot (42-by-90-feet) lots.

For the Casa del Cielo project by Meister Development Group of Phoenix, Richardson’s firm produced an angled Z-lot plan--with both the lot and the house at an angle to the street--to further minimize the driveways and garage doors. The 150-unit development was completed in 1985 in Scottsdale, a Phoenix suburb.

A third popular lot configuration is the wide-shallow lot, typically 55 to 70 feet wide, but only 55 to 70 feet deep rather than the more common 100 to 150, Richardson said. Unless a lot is at least 70 feet deep, however, the wide-shallow configuration yields a too-small back yard, especially since virtually all houses being built on small lots have two stories, he added.