REAL ESTATE : County’s Builders Are Big Winners at Awards Dinner

Orange County may be home to some of the nation’s priciest residences and office buildings, but it is also increasingly the place where developers from other areas look for new ideas for their homes and offices.

That was made abundantly clear Thursday at the annual awards dinner at the Pacific Coast Builders Conference in San Francisco. Orange County builders and architects dominated the event, capturing 16 of the 41 grand awards and 39 of 154 merit awards.

Entries for the PCBC’s Gold Nugget awards came from projects in 14 Western states, making the large number of awards given to county-based firms a lot more impressive than if the competition was drawn only from California.

Among the winners were J.M. Martin Development, which captured best-of-show honors for a single-family detached home of 2,500 to 3,000 square feet, and Newcomb Development’s best-of-show for attached homes under 1,200 square feet. Both winning entries were built in Huntington Beach.

Of course, some of Orange County’s big names captured awards--the Irvine Co. and owner Donald Bren’s own development firm, the Bren Co., as well as the Santa Margarita Co. But so did a host of smaller firms.

The strong showing seems to lend credence to the local development industry’s oft-heard boast that despite a landscape dominated by hulking, flesh-colored Mediterranean-style homes, there is cutting-edge work being done here.