“The California Room” is designed so the home’s roof covers an outdoor patio. Flooring on this patio is then matched to the same texture and color as inside the home.
What makes it unique are glass doors—as large as 10 feet high and 20 feet wide— that slide into nearby walls or bend like an accordion.
“These things are a dream,” Steven Dewan, the senior principal at Newport Beach-based Bassenian Lagoni, said about the doors.
“All of a sudden, you have these great big walls of glass that open up to the outside. Your space becomes that much larger. Your sightlines becomes that much greater.”
Such large sliding doors, which have gained the moniker “California Doors” among realtors, are an example of innovations once limited to custom built homes that are now making their way into the thousands of new homes being built in Irvine, Rancho Mission Viejo and Baker Ranch.
Bassenian Lagoni has designed more than half of the new homes on the Irvine Ranch, said Dewan, who gave the Business Journal a tour of three model houses his company designed called Alara, which is in the Irvine gated community of Altair, an 840-home venture between Toll Brothers Inc. (NYSE: TOL) and Lennar Corp. (NYSE:LEN).
Horsham, Pa.-based Toll—the country’s largest builder of high-end homes—is building 86 Alara homes, which range from 4,368 to 5,247 square feet, with four to seven bedrooms and up to nine bathrooms. The homes start around $2 million.
These homes incorporate techniques such as “floating ceilings” where lights make kitchens appear bigger. They have stylish chandeliers hanging from ceilings as high as 34 feet, which is the height of an Olympic diving platform. Some even have space for elegant swimming pools.
“This is resort living in your own house,” Dewan said. “It’s an exciting time in the world of residential architecture.”
Formality Gone
The first notable change from 30 years ago is the entry, which has shifted from double doors to a 10-foot-high single door made of frosted glass.
A second difference is the elimination of formal rooms for dining, living and the kitchen. In its place are what developers are calling “the great room” that combines all three.
“We’re not a society that has formality anymore. It’s like how everyone used to wear ties 10 years ago. The design of our homes is a reflection of that informality.”
Still, these great rooms can give a sense of awe as the back wall may consist of windows as high as 20 feet or more.
The fireplace is horizontal rather than the traditional box shape. Some houses are eliminating them altogether because families no longer gather around them inside the home, preferring to sit outside around fire pits, he said.
The kitchen may have one or two islands. There’s also a second kitchen for cooking with products like a wok, where there is plenty of flavor and smell.
The ground floor also features a bedroom with an adjoining sitting room that has 14 windows.
Despite the $2 million-plus sale price, the home has only a two-car garage. Designers have found that in a three-car garage, the third spot was often wasted on storage, Dewan said.
A Shower So Big…
On the second floor, the master suite’s bathroom can match any resort for elegance. What used to be 9-square-foot shower in older homes has morphed into a 60-square-foot space where doors aren’t needed.
The washing/drying machines have emerged out of the garages and are now in their own second floor room, close to the master suites for convenience.
The second floor bedrooms have balconies and windows with corners to give them the feel of a San Francisco Bay Window. The hallways have square corners instead of rounded ones, a small detail that makes them look “crisp and clean,” Dewan said.
The homes have optional third floors— known as the “bonus room”—that have enough space for an outdoor patio, a television, a bar and/or a pool table.
“The home is very informal today and there may be multiple informal spaces to live,” Dewan said.
