Promised Land

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What if a collection of leading California architects, land planners, landscape pros, top builders and financial backers teamed up to build the new community of their careers on one of the last great parcels at the far northeastern tip of San Diego? What if this dream team kept all its promises?

One current project has been getting a lot of attention from the national building industry for its eyebrow-raising architecture, landscape design, land planning and environmental harmony. The project is Santaluz, a 3,900-acre, red-tiled residential village at the eastern end of Carmel Valley Road and San Dieguito Road, just south and east of Fairbanks Ranch and Rancho Santa Fe. Santaluz (“sainted light” in Spanish) is tucked away in the hills, just a breeze away from the Pacific, yet within the city limits of the nation’s seventh-largest municipality. Nearly completed, with a grand opening set for this month, the village is the product of a partnership of Taylor Woodrow Homes and DMB Associates.

Two creeks flow westward from the slopes of nearby Black Mountain through Santaluz grasslands, ridge outcroppings and stands of wild oak. Lusardi Creek on the north moves to the sea through willows and reeds at the bottom of a rugged ravine, while La Zanja Creek to the south meanders lazily past thickets of native shrubs and an occasional grove of tall eucalyptus. Amid the rolling grasslands of the San Dieguito River valley, 942 homes are being built with two overriding themes: “Keep it simple” and “Disturb the land as little as possible.”

Santaluz’s rustic architecture is a blend of linear, one-story European farmhouses, Mexican haciendas and elements from California’s rich Spanish Colonial period. Architectural precedents include the work of local design icons Cliff May and Thomas Shepherd, who, among others, championed a red-tile renaissance in California that featured ranch-style adobe haciendas, the stately Monterrey-style home and the familiar terra cotta–tiled bungalow.

“The project’s architecture has one mission: It is intended to be at peace within the landscape,” says Robert Hidey, lead architect for Santaluz. “A key design intention is

to disappear effectively within the landscape.” To achieve this, broad 50- to 200-foot setbacks between individual homes or small clusters of homes create a spaciousness that allows the buildings to appear as if they emerge from the landscape, rather than overwhelming it.

Land planning here—especially the layout and grading of home sites—has captured lightning in a bottle with the national building industry and its media. About 750 of these new homes are to be built on circular pads, a Santaluz innovation that allows for a greater diversity of home types and views throughout the village.

Those curvilinear shapes, which allow room for as few as one or as many as eight detached homes per pad, are the principal way Santaluz differs from other communities. They provide a lazy-susan effect that enables the home site to be shifted on the lot to get the best view. As a result, Santaluz received an unheard-of grand award from Builder Magazine for land planning even before the first worker showed up on the job.

About three years ago, a dozen homebuilders entered a design competition to build on what was formerly known as Black Mountain Ranch South. Five so far have met the criteria, because they fit the overriding architectural design of Santaluz’s main project partners, Taylor Woodrow Homes (based in England and Laguna Hills) and Scottsdale-based DMB Associates. Others will be considered for future phases.

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