Orange County architecture firms are seeing a reality emerge that once seemed far-fetched: condominium towers in their own backyard.
In OC, an area famous for single-family homes in planned communities, at least 30 condominium towers are in the offing for OC.
“It ain’t the Orange County of 20 years ago,” said Daniel Gehman, principal of Thomas P. Cox Architects Inc. in Irvine.
This is a new opportunity for architectural firms, though today only a handful of OC firms are considered realistic contenders for the condo tower business.
Architecture firms are responding by reassessing their operations and adding workers to tackle the condo market. Many see the change as part of a long-term shift to higher density housing that’s changing the landscape of OC.
“You can’t sprawl anymore,” said Jirair Garabedian, director of design for the Southern California team at architectural firm KTGY Group Inc. in Irvine.
That’s a big change, architects said.
After all, this is OC, where 2,500-square-foot homes and double left-turn lanes are the norm. The county’s planned developments have attracted attention from all over the world, and sent OC architects to build Irvine-like communities in China and Japan.
But OC is only so big, and room for new construction has been harder to find and made land much more expensive,ranging from $1 million to more than $3 million an acre.
Even before the foundations were poured for the first condo towers at Irvine’s Park Place, the growing scarcity and rising price of land pushed some developers to more dense housing.
They included higher-density condominium projects with two, three and sometimes four floors that sit atop parking garages.
Condo towers received attention regionally in the late 1990s and early this decade as developers built up in Los Angeles and San Diego.
One of those companies was Vancouver, British Columbia’s Bosa Development Corp. It oversaw the development of a couple of large-scale condo projects in San Diego,and found eager buyers.
By 2003, the developer turned its attention to OC and decided to build a pair of 18-floor towers near the San Diego (I-405) Freeway in Irvine at the Park Place office complex.
Bosa’s condos sold out quickly, surprising the skeptics, and giving other developers hope towers could work in OC.
“That was a huge buzz,” Thomas P. Cox’s Gehman said. “It was just enormous. That seeded the clouds.”
Since then, condo tower plans have extended to Anaheim and Santa Ana.
In some ways, OC is just part of a national trend. Condo towers are sprouting up in traditionally suburban locales such as Phoenix and Texas, experts said.
“There’s definitely a very interesting turn in the housing market that I don’t think people really believed would happen 15 years ago,” said Gita Dev, past chairwoman of the American Institute of Architects’ Housing Committee.
Getting In
Despite the opportunities to land high-rise work, getting into the condo market isn’t an easy prospect for architects.
Building tall structures with steel and concrete is a far cry from stick-frame homes, which many local architects have become experienced at designing.
Planning for high-rise condo towers still requires expertise in home design, but also in engineering, architects said.
“You have to have a real good technical knowledge of how to put these things together,” said Carl McLarand, president of McLarand, Vasquez, Emsiek & Partners Inc. in Irvine.
And a specialized brand of engineering expertise is required in California, where tall buildings must be able to withstand earthquakes. Here, condo towers can’t sway violently from side to side during an earthquake, which requires the towers to be built with heavy structural reinforcement.
At the same time, architects must keep in mind that the buildings must be designed for housing, not empty floors more common in commercial buildings.
Today’s condo buyers don’t want lots of walls and bulky exteriors that may help make the building solid in an earthquake, but hard to live in, McLarand said.
One way to avoid poor design is to plan for massive concrete “tubes” with thick walls that run up the middle of the towers,housing everything from the elevators to electrical wires.
Tubing gives architects more flexibility in condo design, such as allowing for huge windows for views from upper floors, McLarand said.
Firms with a history in residential home design also can get those little details right that commercial architects may not see, Gehman said.
“I think about what you see when you roll over in the morning,” he said.
For example, a residential architect knows lighting in the bathroom is crucial to women putting on makeup or men shaving in the morning.
Local architectural firms have been beefing up their staffs with architects who have condo design experience. They’ve looked beyond OC to places like Toronto and Chicago where condo towers are more common (see related article, page 86).
“Architects that want to stay in business will always respond to the marketplace,” said Art Danielian, president of Danielian Associates Inc. in Irvine.
In the past couple of years, Danielian has hired 20 people to work on condominium and apartment projects. The firm now has about 65 workers total.
So far, these new hires mostly have tackled shorter condo projects with four-stories and two-floor garages. But Danielian said he’s looking at an offer to do work on a 30-story tower that needs some initial design work.
Thomas P. Cox decided to focus more on apartment and condo buildings about five years ago. It previously did work mainly for single-family homes.
The firm has landed a handful of projects to turn former commercial towers in Los Angeles into condo buildings. And Thomas P. Cox expects to see some work from OC’s crop of condo projects in the next few years.
KTGY also has launched a high-density unit that has tackled jobs in Tokyo in Oakland,and hopes to get more in the future in OC.
McLarand’s firm,one of the largest in OC,has been pursuing apartment and condo projects, including towers, since the 1990s.
McLarand designed twin 15-story towers at the corner of Jamboree Road and Campus Drive. Phoenix-based Opus West Corp. and Scottsdale-based Geoffrey H. Edmunds & Associates broke ground on the projects, called The Plaza-Irvine, earlier this year.
Architects say firms will continue to change their ways to adapt to the demand for higher-density housing and even condo tower building in OC, though many say traditional single-family home design remains a viable business.
“We’re all being challenged to move up the density ladder,” Garabedian said.
Although shrinking land availability has helped propel the popularity of condo towers, there’s also a growing acceptance of the idea among a couple of key demographics: young professionals and empty nesters.
These aging retirees may want to avoid the move their parents took to Phoenix or Miami, said Stan Barden, principal in charge of the high-density team at KTGY.
Instead, they’d rather live in OC’s “active environment” that’s close to shopping but without the hassles of keeping up yards and making sure the roof doesn’t leak, Barden said.
Also, many young professionals,especially those without children,are ready to skip the hassles of owning a single-family home and own a condo in a tower that has a more urban feel.
“It’s a function of people like me,” said Thomas Cox, chief executive of Thomas P. Cox Architects. “I’m kind of like the Generation X buyer. I could live very comfortably with the amenities of a condo.”
Many condo buyers also are looking to avoid long commuting times, architects said. OC’s condo towers are set for business districts in Irvine, Anaheim and Santa Ana.
Another reason: cost.
Although a new condo for $550,000 is hardly an entry-level price, it’s low enough to let some buyers sneak into the housing market. The median price of a single-family home was more than $700,000 in OC in July, according to the California Association of Realtors. Many new homes easily top $800,000.
Condo prices are “relatively inexpensive compared to the extreme price increases in the general residential market,” Dev said.
And as with any housing unit in California, investors have their eye out for condos they think will rise in price after a few years.
California communities also have gotten some help from Sacramento. In the early 1990s, developers backed away from condominium construction after they endured a wave of litigation for water leakage or sound barriers.
But the Legislature has stepped in to help with some rules that allow condo companies to get a chance to fix a problem before it goes into litigation, architects said.
Not only is high-rise housing changing the way many people will live in OC, it’s also changing design here.
Many of OC’s existing housing has a Spanish and Mediterranean look. Condo towers have a more modern look, with cleaner and simpler lines,something much more urban than OC natives are used to seeing.
This partly reflects the nearby businesses that include office towers or old manufacturing areas.
“It’s more in keeping with the airports, offices and hotels,” Cox said.
For architects that have grown up designing two-story homes, this is a whole new world.
“It’s interesting, edgy work,” Gehman said.
