Yachts usually take center stage during the Newport Beach Christmas Boat Parade, but Bob Olson’s ornately-decorated home on Balboa Island caught plenty of attention on the first day of the city’s annual holiday extravaganza, both for its exterior decorations and the guests for a Dec. 20 event there.
Attendees included Gavin Herbert, Lynne and Augie Nieto, Jeff Moorad, Lucy and Rick Rawlins, Al Baldwin, and our own Richard Reisman.
Olson’s home—the model for Newport Beach’s Lido House hotel—got a nod in the city’s Ring of Lights contest for home decorations during the holiday period, one more accolade to add to the developer’s growing list. See our front page profile on Olson and our other five Business People of the Year profiles in this week’s issue.
Another unexpected head-turner during the holidays, this time during Torrance’s annual Sleepy Hollow Christmas Lights event, a multiblock extravaganza that brings car and pedestrian traffic to a standstill: the bright red Karma Revero one visitor drove through the packed crowds. It got more looks than any Santa decoration.
Irvine’s Karma Automotive should be getting even more attention this week in Las Vegas—thanks in part to a tech firm now establishing a bigger OC presence. It’s exhibiting at the Consumer Electronics Show that’s about to kick off in Sin City.
The carmaker is using CES to show off cybersecuity technology from Cylance’s soon-to-be parent company, BlackBerry, to safeguard its luxury vehicles.
The Insider took a 2,600-mile trip east over the holidays to the proto-Irvine, Columbia, Md., one of the country’s first master-planned communities.
Developer James Rouse was the original Don Bren (minus a few billion dollars), creating the city in 1967, four years before Irvine’s incorporation. Columbia (32 square miles, about half that of Irvine) counts a little more than 100,000 people, roughly 40% the population of Irvine, and holds the most prominent mall located between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
Plenty of OC’s connections—and inklings about the 2019 fortune for some of our area businesses —were gleaned during a post-Christmas visit to the shopping center, which saw the Vans store packed, a Chipotle with the longest lines in the food court, and a PacSun store drawing a fair, but not overwhelming, amount of younger shoppers.
Less fortunate: the center’s CaliBurger, one of roughly a dozen U.S. locations for a fast food chain whose menu and décor has drawn the ire of Irvine’s In-N-Out Burgers due to their striking similarities. It was empty around dinner time. No sign either of ‘Flippy,’ a robotic burger-flipping contraption that CaliBurger has rolled out at other locations; Newport Beach’s Acacia Research has invested in the Pasadena-based robotics maker that the restaurant chain is using.
