Life of opulence and luxury in Orange County

Press, 4 November 1986, Page 21

Life of opulence and luxury in Orange County

By

STAN DARLING,

who recently visited the

United States.

Each of the neatly stacked apples is individually polished. Just across the way, a grand piano’s keys move through classical and popular pieces without benefit of playing fingers. Only the out-of-towners gawk as if something unusual is happening here. Only the uninitiated seem to give the elegant player piano a second thought. Everyone else, the surrounding diners having their lunch, just accept the novelty.

The apples, the piano and the unaffected diners are in Atrium Court, a shopping centre where opulence seems to go unfettered in a place where other examples of unrestrained affluence come at you in dizzying abundance. This is Newport Beach, in Orange County, Southern California.

Atrium Court resembles a Spanish palazzo. It is ringed by 16 salmon-coloured Cantera stone columns, each rising 21.3 metres from floor to ceiling. Three kinds of polished marble, and Andes black granite, were used in the reconstruction project. You can look up through three levels of boutiques from the

adjoining Irvine Ranch Farmers Market, a supermarket. The whole thing is only part of a larger unit, the Newport Centre Fashion Island. Clumps of shopping malls are held together by open-air plazas. Everything seems nearly new, bur appearances are deceiving. Much of it is old enough, or obsolete enough in shopping terms, to be torn apart. Renovation is being done everywhere. Nothing seems to last long without being altered. Orange County is enjoying a high-technology boom, a hotel boom and just about every other kind of boom you can imagine. No-one expects, or wants, a bust, but quite a few people in the county south of Los Angeles yearn for a slowdown. Groups calling themselves Stop Polluting Our Newport, Newport 2000 and Gridlock are finding a lot of support for their slowgrowth activities. In 1982, community activists were able to force the withdrawal of a Newport Centre expansion plan. Now the plan is back again, even stronger. It is called a “build-out plan,” under which

the big centre would be expanded by 120,770 square metres to provide room for office buildings and car parks. The Irvine Company, a major Orange County landowner and developer of Fashion Island, is behind the plan.

Opponents say the expansion will simply make traffic congestion worse in a land where everything revolves, if sometimes haltingly around the automobile.

The Irvine Company has offered to build a 9.6-kilometre road to relieve nearby Corona del Mar’s business centre, and will widen other streets, including the Coast highway. This is not nearly enough for the protesters, who have gathered enough petition signatures for a referendum on the plan later this year. The Newport Centre build-out is expected to increase traffic by 20 per cent in nearby' streets. Citizens for a Better Newport, which supports the plan, has an architect as its spokesman. The battle of words can get pretty rough. A sister of the architect is a slow-growth supporter who has described him as “a Tokyo Rose

for the Irvine Company.” (Rose was a Japanese-American who broadcast propaganda for Japan in the Second World War).

Opponents of the Newport Centre expansion are prepared to press an environmental law suit if the referendum move fails.

Shopping has become such a big deal in America because, as one researcher says, it is now the country’s main cultural activity. It is a way for people who are raking in the money to get rid of some of it, and the more successful shops there are, the more jobs there are. The median income in Orange County is about SNZBB,OOO a year. One estimate says that the county could have 306,000 more jobs by the year 2000. Everywhere you turn, a new mall — or a new mall concept — is being developed and re-devel-oped. Automobile malls, where drivers can fill all their motoring needs in one place, is just the newest method of one-stop shop-

ping. They are a natural for freeway-tied Southern California, and the first one was reportedly created by Orange County’s Irvine Company. Designers, ironically, have to give equal emphasis to pedestrian and motor traffic in the new malls, which bunch together car dealerships and associated retailers instead of having them strung out in the traditional strip development. Some dealers were thinking of moving out of the area altogether, to more attractive sites, before the auto malls came along to cater for their own needs, as well as those of their customers. The new Irvine Medical Centre, opening in two years, is even being billed as having a “mall-like setting.” A health-care mall, with shops and services close at hand to medical facilities, will be in the centre. As in a shopping mall, “the atmosphere is going, to be one of convenience and consumer awareness,” says publicity for

the medical facilities in the "Newport Centre News,” a monthly business newspaper devoted solely to futhering the Newport Centre’s interests. Services for women and children will be emphasised at the health mall.

The economic output of Orange County was SNZ27 billion in 1975. That has jumped to SNZIOO billion in 11 years. Real estate advertising in local newspapers points to the amount some people are prepared to spend to live in their moneyspinning environment. One house has this feature, among others: “Boat slip will accommodate large yacht!” On Newport Bay, the house has a private sandy beach, nine bedrooms, six and a half baths, three spa tubs, and a “quality custom exterior with lighthouse replica.” It is offered at $6,800,000. Trades will be considered.

Hotels are also big business. Orange County has more than 36,000 hotel rooms, compared to less than 900 in Christchurch (but 3500, if you count tourist hotel, private hotel and motel rooms).

The Irvine Company formed a new division, the Irvine Hotel Company, less than a year ago. It plans to complete one hotel a year for some time to come. The “Los Angeles Times” says that the hotel development rush is nearly over, but is still apparent in Orange County, where 14 new hotels or additions — 2600 rooms — opened in the last year. In Newport Beach alone, the number of hotel rooms nearly doubled in a year, from 700 to 1300. Federal tax incentives in 1981 and 1982 spurred hotel construction, but tax reforms requiring more equity in real estate projects will help put the brakes on development. Orange County’s newest pride is a building that looks like a giant, post-modernist outdoor sculpture, but it is a place,

according to one investor, that will stop the area from being a “cultural suburb” of Los Angeles. The SNZI42 million Orange County Performing Arts Centre sits on land that was once a lima bean field. It was opened late last month. The bean-growing family donated two hectares of land, across from a huge shopping centre it had developed, and SNZI2 million towards the project in 1981. Until now, the Los Angeles Philharmonic performed in a high school auditorium when it travelled to Orange County. The concert hall interior, designed with help from three acoustics experts, is a “visual jumble of puzzle-piece shapes and angles,” according to one observer, which will more accurately carry sound to an audience.