O.C. Shines at Building Industry Awards : Recognition: The prestigious event underscored the county’s reputation for innovative housing and land-use design.
Orange County builders, planners and architects dominated their industry’s major awards competition Wednesday, taking home a special design award, a best of show and nine of 37 grand awards.
The annual awards, presented at the Pacific Coast Builders Conference, underscored the county’s growing reputation for innovative housing and land-use design in urban areas--despite the predominance of hulking, earth-toned Mediterranean-styled homes in most new developments.
Orange County competitors also captured 36 of 141 merit citations handed out. In all, 600 competitors from 14 western states submitted entries in what generally is considered to be one of the most prestigious building-design competitions in the nation.
The top honor to an Orange County builder at the annual Golden Nugget Awards ceremonies went to J.M. Peters Co., of Newport Beach, for the best-designed detached home built for a small lot.
The Peters Co., best known for building luxury homes, also won the best-of-show honor and the grand award for best single-family detached home under 1,500 square feet. That award was for a 1,465-square-foot plan for a home on a 3,600-square-foot lot in the Promenade development at Foothill Ranch, near El Toro.
While Peters homes typically sell for $350,000 and up, the 118 homes proposed for the Foothill project are priced from $215,000 to $260,000. The county’s other double winner was RecreActions Group of Companies, which captured top honors for the best attached-unit residential project and best small unit design for its lavish Corte Bella town home project in Irvine.
The floor plan for a 1,075-square-foot unit in the same project, which packs 260 units onto 11 acres in a design modeled after 15th-Century Italian villas, won the Newport Beach builder the award for best small town home design.
San Juan Group, a year-old company founded by former Rancho Santa Margarita Co. executive Dennis Bean, won the grand award for best affordable project--the 342-unit, 20-acre Tijeras Creek condominium development in Rancho Santa Margarita.
And proving that all need not be form and structure and red-tiled roofs, the retro-Art Deco Ruby’s Diner in Laguna Beach captured a special design award for architect Marc Singer and C.T. DeCinces Construction for what the judges called “a very unique re-creation of a 1940s-1950s drive-in diner designed to catch everyone’s eye and bring back a little nostalgia.”
The builders’ group is the largest regional group of its kind in the nation, and its annual awards can provide a major boost for builders, developers or designers, said Ann Romano, a marketing specialist in El Toro.
Romano, owner of Ann Romano Associates, has prepared dozens of Golden Nugget entries for clients over the years. She said some contestants are so determined to take home one of the trophies that they spend tens of thousands of dollars on architectural photographs.
