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Dual Hotel-Office Project Proposed in Airport Area

A nine-story development featuring a boutique hotel and nearly 167,000 square feet of office space has been proposed for a vacant site on Jamboree Road in the John Wayne Airport area of Irvine, one of the largest commercial projects put forth there in recent years.

City records show an affiliate of YLS Brands, an upstart Irvine-based firm that sells a line of Korean-made skincare products and is seeking to branch into other luxury-branded offerings, is heading the project. Its website cites a goal of becoming one of the world’s biggest lifestyle brands.

It’s the firm’s first reported commercial development anywhere. City filings show it’s working with Irvine-based land development planning and engineering firm Urban Resource and Architects Orange on the project’s design and entitlement.

The development, now in the process of early entitlement work, would be on about 6.2 acres at 18582 Teller Ave. between Teller and Jamboree where an industrial building was torn down nearly a decade ago.

It’s between Trammell Crow Co.’s recently-opened Boardwalk office development and the 2722 Michelson office building, which is under renovation to become the new home of Palmer Luckey’s Anduril Industries Inc. in a few months.

An affiliate of Houston-based developer and investor Hines is believed to have owned the Teller Avenue property as of early this year, according to real estate sources. The site was previously planned to be part of Hines’ California Green, a multibuilding office development that was scrapped during the recession.

No record could be found of YLS purchasing the land from Hines, whose local executives declined to comment on the proposed development. YLS couldn’t be reached for comment.

The project is at least over a year from groundbreaking, assuming the city approves it. City planning officials emphasize that the project is still in the early stages.

It’s the second large airport-area office and hotel project in planning. Last year, Irvine-based Great Far East Inc. got the city’s OK to build two 15-story buildings, one an office, the other a hotel, across the street from the airport on MacArthur Boulevard. A construction schedule hasn’t been disclosed.

6th Floor Pool

City records indicate the YLS project would be called the Banc Hotel, spanning 687,000 square feet, including a six-story, nearly 276,000-square-foot parking structure whose top floor would include a large “event venue” with a swimming pool and other amenities.

The interconnected nine-story offices at Boardwalk next door, by comparison, total about 545,000 square feet, excluding its multilevel parking structure.

The 234-room YLS hotel would total about 245,000 square feet, including facilities on each floor.

It would “provide temporary lodging in the [Irvine Business Complex] area and will complement the range of existing adjacent and nearby uses,” according to the city documents.

The project’s office component would include a six-story professional and medical office building connected to the hotel.

A spa, fitness center and restaurant space are also planned.

Subs, Snake Venom, Soybeans

The project’s owner-developer is listed as Banc Hotels Inc. Nevada state records show it’s headed by executives with YLS, whose local offices were based in a building on Von Karman Avenue until last week, when employees were seen closing the location and moving out of the property, though they declined to comment on where the firm was moving its local operations to.

The company also lists locations in South Korea and Hong Kong.

YLS, short for Your Life Style, is headed by John de Vries, a former race car driver who owned a number of Subway sandwich franchises in Southern California in the 1990s and who later grew his business lines in Australia, according to a 2002 Los Angeles Times story.

The company’s website lists a variety of luxury lifestyle-related products it intends to bring to market, including apparel, nutrition and personal-care offerings.

Skincare collections appear to be its only product currently for sale. Among the offerings are a “snake venom collection,” a synthetic form of snake venom YLS says creates “a smooth complexion without the need for injectables like Botox.”

The main ingredient in its “natto collection” is “the stringy, sticky Japanese dish made from fermented soy beans,” the website said.

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Mark Mueller
Mark Mueller
Mark is the Editor-in-Chief of the Orange County Business Journal, one of the premier regional business newspapers in the country. He’s the fifth person to hold the editor’s position in the paper’s long history. He oversees a staff of about 15 people. The OCBJ is considered a must-read for area business executives. The print edition of the paper is the primary source of local news for most of the Business Journal’s subscribers, which includes most of OC’s major corporate and community players. Mark’s been with the paper since 2005, and long served as the real estate reporter for the paper, breaking hundreds of commercial and residential real estate stories. He took on the editor’s position in 2018.
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