See Christopher Trela’s story on this page for an update on the latest location for famed local restaurant Il Barone, the longtime fave of the late Paul Musco and other fans of Italian cuisine and power lunches.
Bar One by Il Barone has taken up home at the Saunders Plaza retail center next to John Wayne Airport. For how long remains a question: last year the roughly 16-acre site along MacArthur Boulevard, with about 77.5K SF of office and retail space, sold to a venture backed by area apartment developer Picerne Group, in what property records indicate was a $50M deal.
Local real estate owner, coin collector and investor John Saunders, a 2017 Business Journal Excellence in Entrepreneurship award winner, got the site entitled for a roughly 400-unit residential development prior to last year’s sale; a date hasn’t been disclosed for when construction could start.
Picerne, which has partnered with Irvine’s Shopoff Realty Investments for a portion of the Uptown Newport development along Jamboree Road, has additional airport-area projects in the pipeline, according to city records.
John Saunders, whose London Coin Galleries has long been located at his namesake Newport Beach center, now has his attention focused on a different retail property owner—Philadelphia-based Pennsylvania Real Estate Trust (OTC: PRET), a troubled owner of malls on the East Coast.
PREIT, as it is called, has seen its shares fall more than 80% over the past year, and about 99% in the past five years. Its stock was kicked off the NYSE late last year and it counted a valuation under $10M as of last week.
“As you know, I am your largest common shareholder, with just under 10%, and am a significant holder of your preferred stock,” Saunders said in a July 11 letter to the REIT’s board, when he urged for a major shake-up at the company’s board.
“Over the last five years, the vast majority of the shareholders’ asset value has been lost, yet management and the board continue to pay themselves handsomely, Saunders said.
“The board seems content to let the company drift until it inevitably falls into the hands of its creditors, leaving little or nothing for the shareholders.”
The REIT responded last week saying a mass resignation by the board “would be a dereliction of the trustees’ responsibilities to the company and its shareholders.”
For the latest trends seen by the area’s crop of interior design and construction firms, see this week’s Special Report, starting on page 17.
For exterior design, firms could do worse than follow in the footsteps of Irvine home furnishings company Bassman Blaine, whose airport-area HQ that fronts the 405 Freeway now sports a giant Business Journal Best Places to Work banner, following its inclusion in our annual listing earlier this month.
That busy stretch of the 405 gets 100M views per year, says brokerage Redwood West.
Hopefully, none of those travelers get too distracted by the signage; a car crashed through the front of RiverRock Real Estate Group’s 405-facing HQ in 2021. The company, now part of Lincoln Property Co., is located two doors down from Bassman’s office.
