Irvine With a Down-Home Side? It’s All in the Master Plan

Amid the rolling hills and rock outcroppings of western Irvine lies Shady Canyon, the planned site of a gated community that might actually live up to its bucolic name.

Though plans for the Irvine Co. development call for as many as 400 luxury homes, designers are taking great pains to give Shady Canyon a rural look, including narrow roads with few sidewalks, limited street lighting and a layout that will conform to the area’s topography.

“It’s certainly a new kind of development for Irvine,” said Sheri Vander Dussen, manager of development services for the city, which is famous for its master-planned “villages” of look-alike homes, grassy parkways and handsome, monument-style signs.

Shady Canyon is one of a growing number of ersatz country developments that seek to mesh suburban conveniences with consumer demand for communities that harken back to the styles and simplicity of America’s rural past.

*

The trend reflects a national design movement known as New Urbanism, in which planners create new communities that resemble old city neighborhoods with front porches, community squares and shops within walking distance of home.

While most New Urbanism developments have been on the East Coast, Orange County has several communities that have taken a similar approach.

“It’s what I like to call New Ruralism, an attempt to bring design elements of rural communities into a suburban environment,” said Mark Baldassare, a UC Irvine professor of urban planning. “It’s based on the fact that when most Americans are asked in polls where they want to live, they [choose] a rural environment.”

Coto de Caza, a 1,800-home gated community in South County, was one of the first to offer country-style suburbia. Begun in the late 1960s, the development has no traffic signals and few streets more than two lanes wide. Instead, it is laid out around golf courses and sage-covered hills with horse trails.

“Most residents don’t own horses, but they like the idea of living in an area with an equestrian-oriented feel,” said Tom Martin, Coto de Caza’s vice president for marketing and sales.

“It almost has the atmosphere of a small Midwestern town. That makes it different,” he said. “We found that, if people are willing to drive an extra 15 minutes to live here, there has to be an extra appeal to the community.”

Like Shady Canyon, Coto de Caza was designed to follow the terrain rather than alter it. Martin said roads and homes were constructed to preserve as many of the area’s 300-year-old oaks as possible. Some trees that could not be incorporated in the design were transplanted.

“It’s worth every penny to save them,” he said. “These old trees are literally our legacy.”

Final plans for Shady Canyon are still being fine-tuned. City officials said they expect the development to have detached homes designed in a conventional style and laid out so as not to obstruct hillside views.

“You won’t look up and see a stark white house against the hills,” Vander Dussen said.

That look will contrast with other Irvine villages such as Westpark, with its rows of attached homes and shopping centers with Mediterranean-style red-tiled roofs.

*

Residents of communities near Shady Canyon are generally supportive of the development. But some environmentalists have raised concerns that, despite the pastoral tone, the project will harm the area’s ecosystem.

“A rural development destroys habitat in the same way a large-scale development does,” said George Gallagher, president of the Irvine Conservancy. “Shady Canyon is Irvine’s last piece of untouched open space with a full habitat of water, deer, birds of prey, road runners. We don’t want to lose that.”

Instead of building on unspoiled hillsides, Gallagher said, developers should locate their projects on former agricultural land that has already been ecologically damaged by years of cultivation.

But the natural beauty of Shady Canyon and other rural developments is just what makes them so appealing to a suburban culture that in recent years has begun to favor sport-utility vehicles and country music, experts say.

The master-planned village concept “seems to have played itself out at this point,” said UCI’s Baldassare. “People are looking for a new type of suburban community.”

The search is sending planners and developers back to the future.

“There is a growing recognition in Orange County that we are slowly but surely leaving behind our rural past,” Baldassare said. “Preserving it whenever possible has become popular public policy.”