Housing: A few Southland builders are digging in to a treasure Easterners have known about for years--basements.

Staples on the East Coast, facts of life in the Midwest, basements have never truly found a home in California.

Because of year-round warm weather and the extra cost of constructing basements, builders in the West have typically chosen to construct horizontally rather than vertically. Many developers have scoffed at the idea of basements, claiming that outdoor-loving California buyers just didn’t want them.

But Randall W. Lewis, executive vice president of Lewis Homes in Upland, is taking a gamble in Los Angeles County.

Lewis is building about 50 homes with basements in La Verne, making the Marshall Canyon Estates project one of the first new master-planned developments in Southern California with basements, according to real estate watchers.

“It’s an experiment. We wanted to offer buyers something different,” said Lewis. “We may be wrong, we may be right, but we’ll know in about six months,” he said.

And outside Sacramento, Cresleigh Homes Corp. of San Francisco offered buyers this year the opportunity to double the size of a 1,186-square-foot, single-story home for as little as $55,000 with what it called a “California basement.” So sure of its popularity, the company even copyrighted the name.

The response: buyers camped out, wanting unfinished or finished basements in 53 of the 60 homes in the project. The master-planned development, thought to be the first modern development in California to have basements, sold out in three months. Now, Cresleigh is planning to put basements in 96 homes in Folsom, northeast of the state capital.

“It’s not a simple thing to build a basement--you’re talking about the difference between arithmetic and calculus,” said Tom Wong, general manager of Cresleigh, who got hooked on the idea of basements after attending MIT in Boston, where basements are common. “But the response we got was tremendous. People love them.”

One of those people is Julie Stolzman. She and her husband, Joseph, who have a 2-year-old daughter and another child on the way, were attracted to the basement as an enclosed play area.

“The family and living rooms are always so close together, but our rec room is the kind of space where children can really spread out,” she said. “We bought the unfinished basement so we can fix it how we want to. It’s great.”

Now, the question is whether more Southern California residents will pay tens of thousands extra to spend time in basement rumpus rooms, which have an average size of about 1,000 square feet--about four of five times the size of an average family room and as large as many two-bedroom condos.

“Very unlikely,” said Frank Foster, regional manager with Fieldstone Homes in Newport Beach, when asked whether the large Orange County home builder would ever put in basements. “I think you can structurally deal with the earthquake risk, the problem is what do you do with a basement in Southern California?”

“You sure don’t need it for a place to go for the kids to get out of the snow,” he said.

Basements are situated under the living space of a house but do not have to be completely underground. Typically, all four sides are surrounded by dirt, but many are surrounded by dirt on three sides and open in the back, according to the Meyers Group, a Newport Beach real estate consulting firm.

Foster said that while earthquake risks can be managed, the costs of building a basement, including disposing of the dirt, coupled with liability concern regarding faulty construction, make basements unattractive to builders. Also, he noted, that it’s almost impossible to find a subcontractor in Southern California who knows how to build a basement. At Cresleigh, Wong overcame that problem by getting someone from back East with experience to teach subcontractors on the job.

But despite the cost and design difficulties, America’s largest home builder is busily constructing basements in Maravilla, a 176-home project near Phoenix, said Mike Trailor, division president for Centex Homes. Buyers wanted basements in more than half the 89 homes in the first phase of the project, paying $50,000 in addition to the homes’ $210,000 price tag.

“We thought it was a success--it sold out quickly, so we decided to offer basements again in the second phase,” Trailor said. “Basements were a way to add more space to a single-story house, so instead of going up, we went down. And in Phoenix, the basement is a cooler environment.”

While Centex is considering basements in California, Trailor cautioned that basements are “appropriate in certain areas, but not a great alternative in any location--you don’t want to build basements everywhere.”

Bassenian/Lagoni Architects, an award-winning home designer in Newport Beach, helped design the partial basements for Lewis Homes’ Marshall Canyon Estates and is working to design houses with basements for an Orange County developer who wants to build in Orange County, said company president Aram Bassenian.

“There are some attempts at basements right here in Orange County,” he said. “Someone needs to do it and prove it can be done.”

But Cresleigh and Centex’s successful efforts have not persuaded Michael Woodley, chief architect at Kaufman & Broad, California’s largest home builder. Although Woodley said he was “intrigued” by the Cresleigh project, he is concerned about the costs involved to make basements safe during an earthquake.

“The Cresleigh project sold so well--it leads me to believe there is some interest from buyers,” he said. “I think you could design it to withstand earthquakes here in Southern California, I just think it’s cost prohibitive.”

Several home builders, noting the success of new homes with traditional features such as front porches and detached garages, said basements are popular with buyers who plan to be in their homes longer and want a house that can grow and change as they do.

“I do believe the front porches and the nostalgia of the 1990s all ties together--a lot of people see a basement as a traditional part of a house,” he said.

As for Lewis, he said he thinks his La Verne basements--in single-family homes built into a hillside--will appeal to both untraditional families and transplanted Midwesterners.

“We’re seeing more untraditional families, so it’s ideal for a mother-in-law, or kids coming home from college and living there for a couple of years,” he said.