Monarch Bay Booming

Architect Tim Good’s client wanted to be in Monarch Bay, even if it meant having to build a 7,200-square-foot basement to do it.

With Monarch Bay’s strict 15-foot height restriction, that was the only place Good could find for the client’s new custom racquetball court, maid’s quarters, office space, entertainment center and five-car garage--tacked on to what was already a $1.75-million oceanfront home.

“We were forced to go underground [with the basement], but he wanted a home in Monarch Bay with a beautiful ocean view and he got it,” said Good, a Diamond Bar architect.

Good’s design for his client--who will ultimately have a 10,000-square-foot home--is perhaps the most extraordinary example of the extremes people are willing to go to these days to live in Monarch Bay.

The 37-year-old gated coastal community of 214 homes at the northern edge of Dana Point has been thrust into the limelight in the past few years because it is the home of Nicole Brown Simpson’s family.

This is where news reporters and cameras have been set up countless times during the O.J. Simpson murder trial, civil trial and child custody trial, hoping for a glimpse of the Browns or a quote as they drive out the gates.

But people here generally shrug off the O.J. factor and offer a variety of reasons for the newfound popularity of their neighborhood, which typically has been considered the modest cousin to its more flamboyant next-door neighbors, Three Arch Bay and Ritz Cove.

Some suggest the new San Joaquin Hills toll road brings the area better accessibility, but most people say the boom is directly related to the maturity of the neighborhood and--until now, at least--the undervalued home prices.

Whatever the reason, the recent activity in Monarch Bay has kept city officials busy toiling over new plans in what was once a relatively settled part of town. City records show that 21 of the houses in Monarch Bay have sold in the last two years and many others have undergone extensive remodeling.

“Up until recently, we hardly paid any attention to Monarch Bay,” said Ed Knight, Dana Point’s director of community development. “Then all of a sudden, whammo, it became a rush.”

Real estate experts and local architects say Monarch Bay is caught up in a phenomenon that is occurring all over Southern California. People are being drawn to older neighborhoods like Monarch Bay that were designed in the late 1950s with quarter-acre lots and 60-foot wide streets--before there was the current pressure for high-density tracts, said Fred Briggs, a Monarch Bay resident and Orange County architect since the late 1940s.

“Today, the tendency is to monstrously overbuild and make everything look alike,” said Briggs, 72, a 33-year Monarch Bay resident. “Some developers would divide all these lots in two.”

The new Monarch Bay resident is buying up the original 2,500-to-3,000-square-foot homes designed back in the late ‘50s and dramatically remodeling and expanding them to about 6,000 square feet, Briggs said.

Although Monarch Bay has strict rules regarding home heights and “view corridors,” homeowners are not as restricted to a theme as in some newer tracts, he added.

“Here we can have individuality. We can have self-expression. We can do anything we want as long as we go by the rules,” Briggs said.

Monarch Bay has another amenity more typical of older coastal developments: a private beach club for the residents. The beach club, which is also being refurbished, has a restaurant and bar right on the sand.

“The Beach Club is a phenomenal benefit that you can’t find anywhere. The next closest one is the Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach,” said Joseph Smith, a local real estate broker.

But Monarch Bay has one more unusual aspect that has historically frightened off potential residents. Monarch Bay homeowners don’t own the land--they lease it from the area’s original landowners, the Moulton family trust.

Although a group of Monarch Bay landowners has recently worked out a deal that allows anybody to buy their land in 2020, it still is a concern to outsiders that has contributed to the bay’s relatively low prices, said Bill Beck, who worked for the original developer of Monarch Bay, the Laguna Niguel Corp.

“It’s a hard thing to explain,” Beck said. “Most people are like Tobacco Road--they want to be able to reach out and feel their land.”

For others, like Good’s client, the leasing arrangement saves them from sinking money into land that could be invested in other areas. As people begin to understand that concept, the interest in Monarch Bay has skyrocketed, Smith said.

“So many people were looking at it as a negative, but it’s a positive,” Smith said.

All the attention has not really affected the lifestyle inside the gates, many residents say. Sure, newscaster Jess Marlow has recently moved in and remodeled a home, and so has a member of the Knott family, owners of Knott’s Berry Farm.

But for people like Herm Roesti, 76, who moved to Monarch Bay in 1965, life remains about the same, although he said people talk curiously about the newcomers who arrive with a lot more money than some of the older residents.

“It’s absolutely amazing what they do, come in and buy a beachfront house at $1.6 million and put in another $200,000 before they move in,” Roesti said.

But even all the hype of the Simpson trials didn’t really change the quiet lifestyle, he said.

“Everybody has kind of followed the trial thing, but that’s really the only upshot of it all,” Roesti said. “And I’ve become friends with the only witness to the murders, the Akita dog, as he wanders around the neighborhood. . . . But this is God’s country. It was the luckiest move I ever made coming here.”