Classic Southland Homes, Just 9,000 Miles From Downtown L.A.

“If you squint your eyes--you’d think it was another Irvine,” said architect Carl McLarand as he unrolled plans for his newest housing development.

With 2,000 homes set among biking trails, gated entrances and even a toll road, the Riverside Golf Club and Residential Community seems like the consummate Southern California housing development.

But then McLarand points out the rice paddies, the swamp and the ancient burial site. And it becomes clear that when this Riverside is built, it will be about 9,000 miles from Los Angeles.

Like in Indonesia.

Struggling to survive a lingering real estate downturn at home, the very same architects who made millions turning Southern California’s sagebrush hills into seas of beige homes with Spanish-tile roofs are reaping big profits once again.

Their expertise in home design and master-planned communities is now in demand throughout the world. But it’s especially valued in Indonesia, a narrow island nation that stretches the length of New York to Seattle.

With nearly 200 million people and an expected growth rate of 7.4% in 1995, Indonesia has both political stability and an increasingly affluent population.

A combination of vast oil reserves, government concessions to foreign investment and a sharp increase in light manufacturing has created an economic boom similar to the one experienced in Southern California in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Armed with cash, leisure time and Western educations (often from USC or UC Irvine), many Indonesians are demanding Western-style comforts. Cars, condominiums and single-family homes top the list.

“In Indonesia, in particular, there has been rapid growth of the middle class,” said Richard Drobnick, director of the International Business and Research Program at USC. “They can afford better housing. And they want a better lifestyle--the lifestyle they’ve seen here.”

And who better to create the new Indonesia that the folks who invented the new Southern California.

“We’re a prize,” said Edward Vasquez, a Costa Mesa architect working in Indonesia. “To have a Southern California architect working for you is the latest fashion. We’re like jewelry now.”

It’s hard to track how big the business is, but some Southern California firms say they are now reaping up to 50% of their revenue in Indonesia. Projects under construction range from mega-shopping, resort and hotel developments to master-planned communities of single-family homes and high-density condominiums. At least one, known as CitraRaya, is designed for as many as 500,000.

“You go to the Hyatt in Jakarta these days and you run into more Orange County architects than you do in Orange County,” said Ronald Holecek of Wimberly Allison Tong & Goo in Newport Beach, who made more than five trips there last year.

Wimberly, known for designing the House of Blues in Los Angeles, is creating two major hotels in downtown Jakarta and a residential community of 5,000 homes just outside the city. With $13.3 million in billings last year, Wimberly had about 20% of that business in Indonesia.

“Every time I go there, it reminds me of Orange County eight years ago. You’d wake up in the morning and hear a nail gun and know a project was going in,” said Tom Turkington, an architect working on a hotel, spa and 280 luxury apartments in Indonesia.

“Last time I was in Jakarta, I looked out my hotel window and counted 40 cranes,” he said. “It’s crazy. They don’t want to stop.”

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The reasons behind the shift to Southeast Asia are numerous: large swaths of open space, lucrative contracts and great demand for homes that look like those in Orange County. But the Jakarta canvas also provides local architects with a once-in-a-lifetime chance to perfect their designs for master-planned communities.

For instance, Newport Beach architect Ralph Martin made his name and fortune designing homes for the Irvine Ranch. Indonesian developers tracked down Martin and his firm after seeing some of their Orange County housing projects.

Now he’s creating CitraRaya, just 11 miles outside of Jakarta. Called City of the Arts, CitraRaya will have outdoor sculptures, murals and several open-air theaters on its 12,500 acres.

“Hopefully, this will be even better than Orange County,” Martin said. “I think we’ve learned a few things.”

CitraRaya offers Martin the chance to create more integrated communities so that mass transportation and open spaces are intertwined. Communities will not be so exiled or remote.

Still, critics question whether bringing master-planned communities to other countries is a good idea. Robert Harris, former dean of the USC school of architecture, doesn’t think they are a commodity that foreign markets need.

“If that’s what we’re exporting abroad now--the isolated tract-housing development--it’s almost as hideous as cigarettes, and we are certainly pumping them over there,” Harris said.

Harris said he was concerned that many American developments were thrown up on the outskirts of large cities without integrated mass transit and retail and office facilities.

But one of his colleagues at the University of Southern California, Edward Blakely, dean of the School of Urban and Regional Planning, said that American architects have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to design projects in Southeast Asia that can correct some of the problems inherent in master-planned communities in the U.S.

Blakely hopes they can better control density and integrate more open space as well as ensure mass transportation is available to the new communities.

“People like Martin are trying to say to Indonesians, ‘Don’t make the same mistakes we did,’ ” Blakely said.

While saying that exact copies of Irvine aren’t what Asia needs, he defended the overall concept of master-planned developments.

“Left to their own devices, they will build higgledy-piggledy all over the place like in Latin America where there is no plan at all,” Blakely said. “The technology we have for master-planned communities is best in the world. Whether or not your particular preference is Orange County--it’s the preference of the world.”

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Author Joel Garreau agrees. In his book “Edge City,” he tracks the evolution of suburban cities on the outside of major metropolitan areas throughout America.

“Every urban area in the world that is growing--is growing in the image of Orange County,” he said. “These countries are trying to demonstrate that they’ve arrived. And for better or for worse, this is what arrival looks like in the 20th century.”

Aram Bassenian, a Newport Beach architect who is designing “California Spanish” homes for master-planned communities located in and around Jakarta, said Indonesian homes have few differences from the Southern Californian variety.

For one, they are made of concrete instead of wood and stucco. They always include a room for the maid. Homes typically offer open carports instead of closed garages because cars are a relatively new status symbol--something to be displayed.

“The Orange County casual lifestyle is what they are attracted to in Southeast Asia,” Bassenian said. “And that’s really what we’re building. It’s a house that depicts a lifestyle.”

At McLarand Vasquez & Partners Inc. in Costa Mesa, they are doing much the same thing.

The firm, which designed Woodbridge in Irvine and most recently the new MTA headquarters in downtown Los Angeles, got the contract for the Riverside community from an Indonesian development group, the head of which had been educated at Claremont Colleges in Pomona.

“He had seen our work on the Newport coast for the Irvine Co. and wanted something like that,” Vasquez said.

“We try and design buildings that are sympathetic for the local culture, but often times they don’t want that--they want Westernized versions,” said McLarand, his partner.

Another Costa Mesa architect, David Klages, is designing Tanjung Lesung, an Indonesian resort about half the size of Coto de Caza, a major housing development in South Orange County.

He said that while they are always sympathetic to local culture when designing projects, sometimes the Indonesians demand more Orange County influence.

As a result, Tanjung Lesung will include a marina for luxury yachts. It will also feature two islands with familiar Orange County names: Balboa Island and Lido Isle.

Said Klages: “It’s a mini Newport Beach.”