O.C. Investors Buy Magazine : Publications: Owner of California Homes and Lifestyles fires the Irvine staff. The new owners plan to revive Orange County Magazine and return it to its former focus on society.

The owner of California Homes and Lifestyles magazine has unexpectedly fired the magazine’s staff and sold the publication to a group of South County investors for an undisclosed sum, the new owner said Monday.

The magazine’s former owner, Magazine Publishing Co. of Van Nuys, has been beset in recent years by problems, including lawsuits, interoffice disputes and a controversial name change for the magazine.

Mark Adams, head of M.A. Communications in Van Nuys, the former management company for California Homes, fired the publication’s eight full-time employees Thursday, including Publisher Mark N. Marth and Editor Cathy Bryant.

“He said, ‘That’s it,’ basically,” Bryant said Monday from her Huntington Beach home. “He just closed it down. It happened so quickly.”

The new president and publisher, Michael Heath, said Monday that he plans to “relaunch” Orange County Magazine, dropping its 5-month-old title. He hopes to resume publishing by May.

Heath said he and a consortium of business people purchased the magazine Friday after former owner Thomas K. Scallen had a falling out with Adams.

He declined to name the other investors.

Heath also heads South Valley Magazine and prints an annual directory for the South County Chamber of Commerce.

Scallen and Marth changed the name to California Homes and Lifestyles late last year, trying to avoid confusion with Orange Coast Magazine.

But Heath said he does not fear any confusion between the two magazines and attributes recent problems in part to the name change.

“I watched the magazine go from being a high-gloss, nice community-oriented society publication to becoming a home-and-garden kind of publication,” Heath said. “Our intention is to re-establish Orange County Magazine as the premier community lifestyle publication for Orange County.”

The magazine has a circulation of 21,000.

Adams and Scallen, an entertainment entrepreneur who purchased the magazine in 1989, were unavailable for comment.

The publication has suffered a bout of financial difficulties in recent years and has weathered several top-level management shake-ups.

Last year, Scallen fired Publisher Susan McFadden, who had sued him for breach of contract. Scallen at the time said that McFadden’s dismissal was unrelated to the lawsuit.

He attributed the magazine’s lack of success to sagging advertising sales, expensive production costs and high overhead, including payroll. He said he will rely more on free-lance writers to reduce costs.

“It’s going to be a leaner machine,” he said, “really state of the art.”