‘Flexible’ Homes Viewed as a Way to Ease Crunch : Development: Santa Ana Heights firm is designing residences with easily subdivided floor plans, an idea it used in Florida project.
A California architecture firm and a Florida resort have teamed up to introduce a “flexible” vacation home based on concepts that could be used to ease the housing crunch in expensive real estate markets such as Orange County.
The design by Bassenian/Lagoni Architects for the Vacation Club Villas at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla., features single-story time-share units with floor plans that can easily be subdivided. The theory might be applied to permanent housing in high-priced markets where extended families often have to share quarters and pool resources to afford a mortgage, said Aram Bassenian.
He said his Santa Ana Heights company is actively developing flexible designs and intends to find clients who would be interested in incorporating them into residential projects.
It was Bassenian’s reputation as a home designer for Southern California’s tract builders that helped him win a Disney contract last year, said Wing Chao, senior vice president of master planning, architecture and design for Disney Development Co. in Burbank, a subsidiary of Walt Disney Co.
After Disney’s marketeers decided to build the time-share project near the Walt Disney World theme park in central Florida, Disney Development never looked any farther than Orange County for its architects, Chao said.
“We know most of the architects around the country, and we know their strengths and weaknesses,” he said. “We wanted a leading (residential) design firm that specialized in production housing instead of one-of-a-kind custom homes, and Southern California, particularly Orange County, is the leading area in the nation for that kind of architecture.”
So Disney Development asked several Orange County architecture firms to submit proposals for the project and, after a design competition among the finalists, chose Bassenian/Lagoni for the residential portion. A Newport Beach firm, Richardson Nagy Martin Architecture, was selected to design the Florida project’s clubhouse and sales office.
Disney specified a Key West theme, so, to capture the flavor of an architectural style described as Victorian with Caribbean influence, Bassenian and his crew flew to the southernmost point in the continental United States and spent several days soaking up the atmosphere.
“We knew nothing about it, so we took tons of pictures and then came back here and focused in on it” in a series of intensive brainstorming sessions with Disney World design and marketing people, Bassenian said.
The result was a set of plans for the 478-unit Vacation Club Villas that consists of a series of two- and three-story buildings in two basic floor plans: a two-story model and a one-story model, the latter of which can be subdivided into two separate residential units.
Atypical of attached housing, the buildings are arranged on the diagonal so that there are windows on three sides rather than just in the front and back of each unit.
Bassenian/Lagoni achieved the interior flexibility by designing the 1,425-square-foot, single-level unit with a “studio lock-off”--a second master bedroom and bathroom suite with its own entrance and veranda. By locking a connecting door, the suite can be turned into a 410-square-foot studio apartment, separate from the rest of the unit.
The design enables Disney to sell time in the full unit, with its two bedrooms and 2 1/2 baths, to the buyer who wants that much room; or to split the space between two buyers, each of whom needs less space or has a smaller budget.
Disney Vacation Club buyers purchase “vacation points” that they can use to reserve time in the villas, with the length of the stay depending on the size of the unit and the time of year. Buyers can mix unit sizes and the time and length of their stays in numerous combinations, said Mary Roche, spokeswoman for the program.
For the current minimum price of $12,535--it increases to $12,888 on Nov. 1--the buyer gets 230 points. That’s enough for a week in a studio unit and a week in a one-bedroom unit during the off-season months of January, September or early December, Roche said, or for three days in the large “grand villa” unit during peak vacation months. A share in the plan lasts for life.
The two-story units are not intended to be subdivided. Designed for time-share buyers with big families or other space demands, the two-story units are 2,360 square feet and have three bedrooms and 3 1/2 baths.
“Working with Disney turns all of your creative juices on,” Bassenian said. “They know how to execute a project well, so as the architect you never fear that your design is going to be poorly done.”
And Bassenian says he sees possibilities in Southern California for the adaptable floor plan not as a vacation time share but as basic housing.
“It has the flexibility we need as high housing prices mean that people will be staying in their homes longer and that their kids will be staying with them--or moving back in after they grow up,” he said.
Bassenian said that his company is working on flexible housing design “without a client. . . . It is often easier to stretch when you are not bound by a client’s constraints.”
The first design project, which is “especially applicable in Orange County,” he said, “is for multi-generational housing” that would include rooms or areas that could be closed off to create several private living spaces within a single shell.
“What we are interested in,” he said, “is looking at the new American home buyer, at new ways of ownership that encompass alternative lifestyles” and go beyond the stereotype of the nuclear family in a detached home.
