Handi-Capable Living : Mariposa Villa Apartments in Irvine Are Subtly Designed for People With Disabilities

The first things you notice are all those blue lines in the parking lot. What can the people who built the Mariposa Villa apartments in Irvine have been thinking? Handicapped parking spaces everywhere. What are the residents going to do with them?

For starters, park there. And after that, possibly, wheel their chairs down the parking lot, through the electrically controlled double doors and into the handrail-equipped lobby carpeted in the special dense-nap, non-skid carpet and lighted with the special natural, non-flickering fluorescent lamps.

Mariposa Villa may be the most disability-friendly apartment building in Orange County. Officially dedicated on Nov. 18, the 40-unit structure is the newest of three apartment buildings in the county built and equipped specifically for people with physical handicaps.

Financed with a $3.2-million grant from the federal department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as with underwriting by the Irvine Co., the city of Irvine, and other public and corporate givers, Mariposa Villa was designed as affordable housing that is also fully accessible. It is the second such project in Orange County that has been coordinated by the Dayle McIntosh Center for the Disabled.

It is remarkable in that the numerous features to aid the tenants are not--apart from the blue handicapped parking spaces--easily identifiable as such. The idea, said architect Joseph Woollett, was to “make it seem typical to the untrained eye. That was important, because people with disabilities don’t like to call attention to those disabilities.”

And all disabled people are not in wheelchairs. This is a common misperception among abled people, said Woollett--particularly among building officials. But Mariposa Villa offers far more than simple accommodation to those who roll rather than walk.

Take the lobby floor, for instance. Most of it is covered in rough-nap carpet with a thin but dense pile, the better, said Woollett, to gain traction when rolling a wheelchair across it. The main traffic “corridors” in the lobby, however, are covered in linoleum. This change in floor texture allows blind residents to better orient themselves. The floor texture also changes from carpet to linoleum when the common halls angle to the left or right, alerting the blind that it’s time to change direction.

For ambulatory people who may need extra support when walking, rails that resemble low ballet bars are fitted along all common area walls. And the main doorway--a set of glass double doors--can be opened with a remote electrical door opener issued to residents who may need one. The button on the device has small rows of raised dots to enable the button to be located without the ability to see it.

To electronically open the front doors from inside, residents need only push a large button about the size of a salad plate, set low in the wall for easy access.

Little of this is apparent to the uninitiated visitor, but Woollett said that with more and more exposure to the lives of people with myriad disabilities, one’s sensibilities begin to sharpen. For instance, Woollett has glaucoma and must periodically be treated with eye drops that render him temporarily blind. During those times, he said, “I have to learn to use the same techniques that blind people use.”

He also learns firsthand about the tendency of common fluorescent lighting to hurt the eyes of people with severely limited vision.

“With a lot of people who aren’t totally blind,” he said, “it’s harder for them to see in that kind of glare. Here, we use natural color lighting, which is more expensive, and we use an electric ballast that eliminates the flicker on fluorescent lights, which many of these people can be sensitive to.”

The apartments themselves, as is the building in general, are neatly equipped to assist in daily tasks while calling minimal attention to the alterations. In fact, the most obvious accommodation is about the size of a quarter: a second front-door peep hole fitted low in the door to enable a person seated in a wheelchair to see through.

In the kitchens, counter heights can be lowered if needed by removing a section of drawer space, and all refrigerators are of the side-by-side variety, to enable frozen food to be stored at a convenient height rather than relying on a conventional freezer that is positioned either too high or too low.

The kitchen faucets, as are all faucets in the facility, are fitted with single levers rather than knobs, to enable those without complete use of their hands or arms to turn the water on and off with a nudge. All electrical switches are prominent and placed lower for greater accessibility.

“Grab bars” are placed strategically around the bathrooms, and all sinks are free-standing to permit wheelchairs to roll cleanly beneath them. Likewise, many of the showers are of the “roll-in” variety to permit wheelchair access over a small sill. The tile in the shower slopes slightly to allow for proper drainage, and all showers are fitted with hand-held nozzles rather than shower heads fixed in the wall at a particular height.

And in every apartment there are two innocuous-looking wall fixtures--they resemble light switch panels--with cords protruding from them. These, said Woollett, are emergency call devices. If a resident has fallen, or has become immobile or is in some other distress, he or she can pull the cord and a light will go on outside the front door of the apartment, alerting the building staff.

Such extensive custom building, said Woollett, whose Orange firm specializes in such nonprofit projects, can be baffling to authorities and contractors who may have never had to work within such specialized strictures.

“These projects,” he said, “are not easy to do. They require cooperation from the city, finding a site, cooperation among architects and planners. You just try to get as many people on the development team as you can. It does take some hand-holding, but I think people are becoming sensitized to this type of project. And there’s a really great spirit here among the tenants.”

Ron Kamaka, 29, the building president, agreed.

“You just don’t find units like this,” said Kamaka, who was injured two years ago in a surfing accident and now uses a wheelchair. “There were at least 300 people on the initial waiting list, and there are still around 150 on it now.”

Kamaka, who was a teacher in Hawaii and hopes to obtain his California teaching credential, continues to make suggestions on how to fine-tune his new home. For instance, he said to Woollett, how about an audible indication that the in-apartment emergency cord had been pulled? Some blind tenants, he said, had recently pulled the cord by mistake and were surprised to learn the warning light above their door was on.

To Kamaka, Mariposa Villa is more than a more convenient place to live; it is an indication of official acknowledgment that disabled people--of all types--can be accommodated.

“I’m just a rookie at being a disabled individual,” he said, “but I know a lot of people who have been fighting for this kind of thing for years. We’re saying, ‘OK, we thank you for your attention, we thank you for your sympathy. Now we want your action.’ ”