Laguna Altura - Living the Good Life in a Big Stucco Cube

I don't often do real estate reviews, but today my wife and I attended the grand opening of a new single-family home development in Irvine - Laguna Altura.  When I was a kid growing up in Orange County new home developments were everywhere as farmland was converted into housing, but these days there's very little raw land left in Orange County to build on so it's a rare event when something new comes available.

We're not in the market for a new home, but my wife likes to look for design ideas, and I like to see what you get for your money these days.

Bottom line:  Not much.

Laguna Altura is made up of four developments, but they're remarkably alike in many ways.  For one thing, every home in the development is two-story and built on what is essentially a square footprint.  You could easily describe the four complexes as small cube, medium cube, large cube, and extra large cube.  They range from about 1,600 square feet and $650,000 for the small cubes, to a maximum of 3,100 square feet and about $1.1 million for the extra large cubes.  Each cube size has three different models and based on the little signs throughout the house, not a whole lot of what you see in the models comes as standard equipment.

Building a square footprint on lots that are barely bigger than the house allows for a lot more homes to be jammed into the same area than you would have found in older developments.  By the time they're done there will be 597 new cubes in the neighborhood.  And with barely 10' between homes you can almost reach out your side window and shake the hand of your neighbor next door.  My townhouse has a deeper back yard than you'll find on most of the homes we saw.

And one of the problems with using a square footprint for all the homes, the architectural possibilities are limited.  After going through the first six models we found ourselves experiencing deja vu every time we opened a front door.  The cubes got bigger, but the architectural layout didn't change much.

I remember when my parents bought new homes in 1965 in Westminster and 1977 in Huntington Beach.  There were four or five models in each development, and each models had a distinctly different footprint.  You can do that when you're not building on postage stamp-sized lots.  You could also flip the layouts so even with only four models the streets didn't look like a whole collection of the same house.  Laguna Altura is 597 examples of the same house.

The bedroom sizes are shockingly small compared to what I'm used to.  I don't think we saw an actual king-size bed in a master bedroom until we got into the largest models.  Most of the smaller models had to use undersized furniture to keep from overwhelming the small rooms.

And closets?  Fuggedaboutit!  With the exception of the largest models the master bedroom closets weren't even sufficient for one person, let alone two.  And the secondary bedroom closets are ridiculous.  If you're kid has more than five outfits, good luck finding a place to put them.  Not only are the closets not very big, they're also very shallow.  In terms of actual cubic space they're probably half or less the size of my son's closet in our nearly 40 year old townhome.  I don't know how a kid could get their stuff in there.

Now, I don't doubt that thanks to the shortage of new construction in Orange County they'll probably have no problem selling these stucco cubes.  However, if I was in the market for another home, I wouldn't even consider Laguna Altura.  I'd go find a nice house in a 30-year old established neighborhood and use the money I save to put in upgrades.  You'd get far more house and lot for your money and the landscaping and hardscape would already be there.

Unfortunately, Laguna Altura is probably what every remaining development in Orange County is likely to look like.