O.C. Firms Set New Gold Standard for Home Designs : Awards: Emphasizing affordability, builders and architects garner more than half the top honors at Pacific Coast Builders Conference.
In what has become the routine in recent years, Orange County architects and builders wore a path to the stage here Friday night as they carried away more than half the top awards in the building industry’s major annual design competition.
In all, the Orange County contingent took 21 of 38 trophies and 58 of 170 merit citations in the annual Pacific Coast Builders Conference Gold Nugget Awards ceremonies--the industry’s equivalent of Oscar night.
But in contrast to last year’s big win by an opulent Newport Beach development of $1-million-plus tract homes, the honors in the 1993 Gold Nugget program were spread among a number of projects that offered more affordable housing, stripped of the architectural excesses of the ‘80s.
If the awards proved anything, it was that the industry--while sometimes slow to do so--can change when survival is at stake.
Thus, many of the same Orange County architects who helped design the high-priced homes during the last decade were seen Friday as leaders of the move back to reasonably sized and priced housing designed for a recessionary economy.
All five of the finalist projects in the affordable housing categories, for instance, were designed by Orange County architects.
Best affordable attached project honors went to designer Dorius Architects in Corona del Mar and builder San Juan Group in Rancho Santa Margarita for the Corte Melina condominium project in Rancho Santa Margarita.
Newport Beach-based Kaufman & Broad Architecture Group, a unit of the giant Kaufman & Broad Homes Inc. of Los Angeles, captured the trophy for best affordable detached housing development for its parent company’s California Encore project in Temecula.
That was not the only case in which architects, builders and projects all came from different areas, illustrating both the increasingly regional nature of the building business and the growing influence of Orange County designers. Two of them--Richardson Nagy Martin Architecture and PacMar-Strock Group, both of Newport Beach--captured merit citations for land planning and architecture at projects in the People’s Republic of China.
Of the five project-of-the-year honors, Kaufman & Broad Architecture Group won for a floor plan in the California Skyline project in the Riverside County community of Perris. The builder of the small-lot, detached-home of the year was the architects’ Los Angeles-based parent, Kaufman & Broad Homes.
The second win by an Orange County designer went to Architects Orange of Orange for the attached home of the year--a floor plan in the La Mirage condominium development in Aliso Viejo. The project was financed and built by two San Diego County companies.
While open only to competitors from the 14 Western states and the Pacific Rim nations, the 30-year-old Gold Nugget Awards is considered one of the top architectural design contests in the nation-- the top for architects who specialize in mass-produced, rather than custom-built, housing.
The show also has helped the building industry improve and adapt over the years, said Irvine marketing consultant Ken Agid.
“It has helped create an awareness and appreciation by builders of what architects can do for them in terms of (how design can help improve) financial return,” Agid said.
“You need to have cutting-edge design to survive in the California market, and while most urban area builders use architects today,” he said, “when this contest got started 30 years ago probably only about one out of 10 projects was done by an architect” rather than the builders themselves.
