A Modern Community Fit for a Pharaoh

Perched atop a choice hillside in Newport Beach, Estate Gardens is Orange County’s newest master-planned community.

The development features a clear view of Catalina Island and the calming waters of the Pacific. Each residence is shrouded in privacy by a stone wall and metal gate, and parking is never a problem.

There is even a design review committee so the neighbors don’t put up anything as gauche as a plastic cactus. The price for all this seems nothing short of heaven-sent--just $54,000 to $121,000.

Has affordable housing finally come to Orange County? Depends on your perspective.

Estate Gardens is a gated community for the dead--a private cemetery within a cemetery--now being offered at Pacific View Memorial Park & Mortuary in Spyglass Hill. These upscale burial spots--essentially family plots surrounded by slump stone and a swinging gate--are becoming popular throughout Southern California.

No one seems to agree on the reasons why. Some observers say it’s a remnant of the materialistic ‘80s, while others view it as a wacky kind of one-upmanship among mortuaries.

Mortuary operators say the gated communities are simply a response to customer demand.

Glendale-based LCB Associates Inc. has designed about 20 gated communities, including the one at Pacific View, and estimates that thousands of people are buried in similar style.

“The demand is tremendous,” LCB President Robert Levonian said. “We’re having trouble keeping enough inventory going in some cemeteries, and I’m having trouble responding to cemeteries asking for assistance in doing this.”

Though walled-in grave sites date back to the 1800s in the United States, few are as extravagant as those at Pacific View. Cemetery operators say such deluxe burial is a distinctly West Coast phenomenon.

“I’ve never understood you Californians,” sighed Steve Morgan, president of the Washington-based American Cemetery Assn.

Among those who have purchased gated burial plots at Pacific View are local notables, including a top real estate developer, a prominent Laguna Beach doctor and a San Juan Capistrano yachtsman. Generally, the price of the plots is of little concern.

Ronald Mowry, a senior vice president at Pacific View’s parent corporation, Pierce Bros., recalled the day an engineering giant came shopping.

“His daily income would have bought the park,” said Mowry, a onetime ambulance driver. “$84,000 to him would be like the two of us going out for coffee.”

Pacific View’s gated communities offer owners a wide range of features. Some purchase there simply to avoid being buried next to strangers; others want to personally design the burial area. One family built beneath a hillside, where there was more room for flower arrangements.

Granite markers are used to present a surname or something more general, such as “the Garden of Memory.” A few families hire chi-chi landscapers to refresh the scenery every month or so.

Of course, lavishness has been heaped on the dead since the beginning of time. The Egyptians built pyramids, the Mayans erected temples and Indians created the Taj Mahal.

But Jessica Mitford, author of the 1960s best-selling book “The American Way of Death,” scoffed at any comparison between Pacific View and the Seven Wonders of the World. “I rather imagine those Orange County people are not quite on a par socially with the pharaohs,” she sniffed. “For God’s sake, I think this whole thing is extremely scruffy.”

Even Mitford conceded, however, that people should be allowed to pay respect to the dead as they like.