Arriverderci, Roma : Home Buyers Are Turning Away From Mediterreanean Styles That Dot Orange County Landscape
Memo to Irvine Co. Chairman Donald Bren: We know you like them, and it is your company and your land and all that, but the people are speaking, Mr. Bren, and what they are saying is that enough is enough.
The ersatz Mediterranean villas--those pastel stuccoed, tile-roofed homes jammed shoulder-to-shoulder in the new towns and villages of Orange County--may be a part of your legacy, but that doesn’t keep them from being overdone.
For the money they must pay for a new home in Orange County, people want a little variety--inside and out.
This used to be known as the place to see cutting-edge design in mass-produced housing.
Now it is better known as the home of the $200,000 garage door, thanks to a building style that sticks garage, entry and a tiny strip of lawn out front and orients the living spaces toward the back yard.
You don’t have to take my word for it, Mr. Bren. Just listen to the 1,718 California home shoppers who recently viewed five architects’ renderings of prototype tract homes and overwhelmingly picked neotraditional, Cape Cod and California bungalow designs for single-family detached homes.
Don’t get nervous. Nobody is suggesting that we do away with the venerable Mediterranean style that you made an integral part of the master plan for your vast land holdings.
It was, after all, the shoppers’ choice in both the entry-level and luxury attached housing categories. The massed Mediterranean look makes sense when you are packing ‘em in at 20 or more to the acre--just look at any tourist poster of the hillside villages of Greece or southern Italy.
But isn’t it time the Southland’s style-setters provide some relief from the stultifying sameness of the views we get these days when gazing at our mostly developed hills?
The shoppers think so, according to Visions ‘92--a statewide survey of home shoppers taken during March and April in 85 new housing developments. Although it was conducted at locations throughout the state, the survey has a strong Orange County and Southern California flavor. Nearly 60% of the responses were gathered in the Southland, including 26% of the total from Orange County.
The study was designed to find out what people want in a new house, and what they aren’t getting.
And it found that they aren’t getting a lot of what they want.
On the outside, shoppers pretty much favored a return to traditional designs that make use of brick, stone and wood siding.
On the inside, they want more room for family and for work. To get it, they said they were willing to give up the wet bars and formal living rooms that personify the yuppie executive entertainment home of the 1980s.
Family and work are keys to the buyer of the ‘90s.
More than half the shoppers surveyed said they have children living at home, and nearly 30% said they do some or all of their job from a home office.
“So that should tell every builder that there is a need to plan home office spaces into their interiors and provide things like computer desks and access for multiple phone lines,” said Robert Mirman, president of Irvine-based National Survey Systems and part of a team of four building industry marketing specialists who designed the survey.
Other team members were John Schleimer, president of Market Perspectives in El Dorado Hills; Jeffrey Meyers, president of the Meyers Group in Newport Beach, and Beverly Trupp, chairman of Color Design Art in Pacific Palisades.
With the recession and the aging of the baby boom generation, people also are spending less time and money on outside entertainment and placing more emphasis on home and family, according to Trupp.
Speaking to several hundred builders at a seminar in San Francisco when the findings were released to the home building industry, Trupp said today’s buyers are no longer enamored of a lot of the design tricks of recent years.
Things as simple as rounded, or bull-nosed, corners and as elaborate as ground-floor layouts that offer formal living and dining rooms and family rooms and country kitchens and breakfast nooks still catch home shoppers’ fancy. But 48% statewide said they would willingly give up the fancy corners if the $900 per house in extra labor they represent could be used to cut the price or add floor space to a family room. And 60% said they would trade a formal dining room for bigger family rooms and kitchens.
Priorities are a little different in Orange County, where most shoppers are in the higher-priced move-up market, said Mirman.
Only 34% of the shoppers at Orange County developments said they would be willing to give up rounded corners inside the house--the smallest group in the state. But 41% said they would accept a smaller lot, compared to 39% statewide. And to get bigger family rooms, 74% said they would take a smaller formal living room, and 52% said they would give up the formal dining room.
The stay-at-home emphasis carries over into amenities. Wet bars aren’t in great demand any longer, but buyers get high on homes that have built-in entertainment centers and are pre-wired for television and stereo speakers in most rooms.
Variety was also high up in most shoppers’ lists; 81% of those surveyed statewide said interior and exterior design that isn’t repeated throughout the neighborhood was an important or very important factor in their decision to buy.
Among Orange County shoppers, a group whose choices have been limited for several years, an even stronger 84% cited variety as an important or very important factor.
Inside the house, Southland shoppers preferred contemporary styles while Northern California shoppers chose the traditional look.
In Orange County, where pastel howling coyotes, bleached animal skulls and American Indian baskets and rugs have been staples of design in most home builders’ model complexes for several years now, only 13% of the shoppers selected Southwestern as a preferred style--the lowest level in Southern California. Also ranking low with Orange County shoppers were country styles.
On the outside, strangely enough, the quest for variety and the unusual has led buyers back to the basics.
“There is a move away from Mediterranean because so much of it was done,” said architect Aram Bassenian, whose Santa Ana Heights firm does work for many of Southern California’s major builders. Bassenian is one of those called on early this year to prepare a selection of dream designs for the Visions ’92 project.
“Buyers are looking for variety, but it is not a reaction against stucco; it is a reaction against that particular style. What people want is a house that uses basic, traditional material like brick and stone and roof tiles that replicate slate or wood, but uses these things in moderation to keep the costs down,” he said.
Bassenian didn’t draw a single Mediterranean style in his submissions in the category of detached single-family homes for the first move-up--homes that would sell for $220,000 to $290,000. Instead, he sketched four variations on the neotraditional theme, homes that incorporate stone, brick, wood siding, columns, pillars, even elements of Grecian design around some of the windows.
Philip Hove, a principal of the CYP Inc. architecture firm in Costa Mesa, was also asked to submit designs unfettered by builder demands. He included one Spanish style in his selection of high-end detached homes, houses that would sell for $275,000 and up.
It finished dead last in the voting.
Northern California shoppers who looked at Hove’s submissions chose a rural traditional design--a variation on the New England farmhouse--while Southern California shoppers split their votes between a California craftsman style and a wood-shingled Cape Cod.
“There is definitely a shift going on in exterior design,” said Bassenian, who said the move away from Mediterranean is accelerating as builders’ inventories of existing homes are slowly disappearing and the new product is appearing on the market.
Bassenian’s neotraditional designs, in fact, have caught the eyes of several builders and will be used in at least one new development that is about to get underway in San Diego County, he said.
The builder, whom Bassenian declined to identify, initially had directed the architect to design traditional Mediterranean elevations for the project, and that’s what Bassenian did.
Then after looking at the designs he did for Visions ‘92, “they decided there were willing to spend the additional money to make the elevations unique and give the project variety,” he said. So they replaced the Mediterranean architecture with Bassenian’s neotraditional designs.
A lot more builders should be making similar moves, said Newport Beach architect M.J. Knitter, who penned a review of the designs submitted for the Visions ’92 project.
The primary interest of the buyers who voted on the 20 elevations, presented in three detached and two attached price ranges, was that “the elevation should be different and unique,” Knitter said.
What drew people to the designs were “new” old-fashioned items like front porches, bay windows and garages that were hidden on the side or in the back of the house.
That might shock a lot of the people responsible for the master planning of Orange County during the past 20 years--but there is a growing demand for change in housing design and community layout.
One of the chief proponents of the so-called neotraditional movement is Peter Calthorpe, a San Francisco planner whose theories have been put into practice in a planned community near Sacramento called Laguna West.
The layout features a grid system of streets, what Calthorpe calls “streets that connect,” and houses that are oriented toward the front yards and the neighbors to each side and across the street.
Homes in Laguna West have front porches, and many have the garages tucked away on the side or facing an alley access.
And does it work?
“We have a three-to-one buyer preference there for home with garages to the side or in the back,” he said. “People want to recapture what we gave away with urban sprawl: neighborhood, villages, a sense of belonging.”
