Upwardly Mobile
The view from Lido Mobile Home Park, which sits on a 23-acre peninsula surrounded by water and million-dollar homes, has always been breathtaking. It’s the park itself that hasn’t been much to look at in recent years.
But the aging Newport Beach community, which occupies some of Orange County’s most prized real estate, is getting a face-lift that could make it one of the most upscale and innovative mobile home parks in the nation.
The boldest piece of the plan will be unveiled today when the park begins showing what are believed to be the first two-story mobile homes ever built in a factory as one structure.
John Curci, an owner of the park, said the models were specially built by Silvercrest in Corona to provide more attractive and spacious housing in a cramped community where the only room to grow was up.
For its part, Silvercrest hopes the two-story homes, which cost about $20,000 more than modern single-story models, will catch on in other parks throughout the country, something industry experts say is certainly possible.
Andy Scholz, director of site development for the Manufactured Housing Institute in Virginia, said many older parks have small spaces that can’t accommodate today’s larger single-story units.
“You can take something like this new two-story house and put it into those communities,” Scholz said. “And people get all the square footage they would get in a wider, longer house.”
The homes, priced around $80,000, are the centerpiece of Curci’s plan to rebuild a park that once boasted of such high-profile residents as John Wayne but that had recently begun to look its age.
Many of the existing homes date from the 1950s, and have flat roofs, aluminum siding and tiny windows that fail to take advantage of the scenery.
“As [the park] aged, it became apparent that we had to do something to either close it down and go to a different use or find a way to revitalize the park so that it could stay in existence,” said Curci, whose family has owned the land since 1947.
Although the inhabitants own their mobile homes and lease the lots from Curci, he said he expects tenants will decide to buy the new units before their leases expire.
The park might have become a shopping concourse or retreat for the ultra-rich had it not been for a visit two years ago by Harold Lynch, president of RGC Corp., a home design company based in Newport Beach.
“I spotted an empty lot in the Lido Mobile Home Park one day while on a boating trip,” Lynch said. “So I asked the leasing office if they would mind if I developed a design for it.”
Lynch, who was initially thinking of a weekend retreat for his family, had no experience with manufactured housing, but he was intrigued by the challenge of developing a design that would fit in Lido’s 35-by-30-foot lots.
Lynch drew up plans for a two-story beach cottage in the style of those found on Massachusetts’ Nantucket island, a design Curci liked so much he asked Lynch to revamp the entire park. Curci and Lynch next sought help from Silvercrest.
Two-story homes had been built by other manufacturers, but only by stacking two sections, each with separate chassis. That method complies with government codes that require each section of a mobile home to have its own chassis, but it is too cumbersome and costly for widespread use.
Silvercrest’s mission was to design a way to build a two-story unit that came in one piece--but was still compact enough to fit under bridges and overpasses.
After about a year of development, the company finally “came up with a chassis system that would lower the house enough so that we could actually get the clearance to ship a two-story home,” said Craig Fleming, vice president of sales and marketing at Silvercrest.
The units are shipped with temporary flat roofs that are replaced by pitched roofs once the home is in place, Fleming said. Even with the flat roofs, Silvercrest had to lower the air pressure in the tires of the company’s trucks to get the huge sections out the factory door.
The result is a beach cottage that fits into a 27-by-27-foot space but provides 1,000 square feet of living area. The two-bedroom cottages come with one bath or two, as well as custom cabinets, ceilings and windows.
Silvercrest and RGC designers came up with clever ways to add the appearance of spaciousness. For example, the raised ceiling in the center of the downstairs master bedroom serves as a platform for the bed in the upstairs bedroom.
State officials say the design is a breakthrough.
“To my knowledge, this is a first nationwide, not just in California,” said Travis Pitts, deputy director for codes and standards at the California Department of Housing and Community Development.
Curci said the park will not displace long-term tenants but that he hopes the two-story cottages will eventually be installed throughout the park as spaces become vacant. About 90 of the 214 spaces are already vacant or being rented on a monthly basis, a stockpile of spaces the park plans to lease to new tenants who buy the two-story units. Existing tenants will be offered a chance to buy the two-story models and trade in their existing homes.
Executives acknowledge the park refurbishment and roll-out of new units will lead to a rise in rents on newly leased spaces by as much as 30% from existing rates, which range from $750 and $1,850 a month.
The first few models arrived last week at Curci’s park and will be sold by Lido Resort Homes, a new subsidiary of RGC Corp.
To usher in this new era, Lido Mobile Home Park has already adopted a more upscale name: Lido Peninsula Resort.
