Ron and Laura Luna moved into their suburban dream house last month — a three-bedroom colonial in Orange County, Calif., featuring walk-in closets, a spacious kitchen and a view of the Santa Ana mountains.
And a public restroom.
That’s a requirement along Front Street, where the houses are not just for living. They also are for making a living.
The 22-home enclave in Ladera Ranch, a master-planned development east of Mission Viejo, is a tentative first step in a new suburban lifestyle: hybrid dwellings deep inside a residential neighborhood where people live in one part of the house and do business in another.
These aren’t just houses with converted dens and high-speed Internet connections for home-based entrepreneurs and telecommuters. Front Street truly merges home and work, with occupants allowed to hire employees and put out business signs, and with parking set aside for customers. Ron will run his real estate business and Laura her concierge service out of the home.
Among the other businesses in the neighborhood will be a day care center, a hairdresser, a recording studio, a house-cleaning service, an insurance agent and a wedding-magazine publisher.
The family enters through one front door, and customers enter through another on the other side of the house. The business and residential sides of the single-family, detached homes are divided by a reinforced fire-resistant wall.
The development, among the first of its kind in the country, represents the leading edge in the transformation of the American suburb from residential refuges into modest centers of commerce.
"This will be in the architecture history books in 20 years," said urban historian Tom Martinson. Changes in home design "eventually reflect where we are as a society. There has been an incredible change in the way we live and work," he said. Front Street "addresses the fundamental question of how people (can) work at home."
In suburbia, retail villages now link townhomes to storefront dental offices, video stores and day spas. And new master-planned communities often boast their own boutique "downtowns" with offices, stores and entertainment.
Sprinkling commercial buildings within a suburban community is one thing, experts say. Planning and designing homes for commercial use is another.
For some, this is a step too far.
"Nobody minds the CPA or attorney" who works out of his home, said Elizabeth Binsack, director of community development for Tustin, Calif., which resisted a similar proposal by another developer. "But people have a problem with the electrician or the plumber who parks his work truck in the driveway. And you can’t make one legal and the other illegal just because it isn’t pretty."
Some say those distinctions no longer makes sense.
"It shouldn’t be illegal simply because you are making a living doing it," said Christopher Hansen, founder of the New Jersey-based Home-Based Business Council, which advocates reforms in local zoning laws to accommodate home entrepreneurs. "What we have is an anachronistic system based on an industrial-age model."
Indeed, there is ample evidence that Americans want to work from home. Hansen’s group estimates the nation has about 25 million home-based businesses, up from 17 million a decade ago.
And according to the National Association of Homebuilders, nearly a quarter of the houses built in the United States today have home offices — compared with 15 percent five years ago. A home office is defined as a space in the house devoted and designed for work, not simply a converted den or bedroom. It is the most-sought-after feature in new homes, according to the association.
They’re popular among accountants, attorneys and architects — the kinds of unobtrusive businesses that can discreetly, if not always legally, operate in residential neighborhoods. In many cities, home-based businesses are allowed as long as the owner doesn’t receive clients, hire employees, post advertisements or store products in the house.
In Front Street, Ladera Ranch’s developer, Rancho Mission Viejo company, and its planners saw an opportunity. The 4,000-acre master-planned community is sprinkled with commerce. There are three retail centers with shops and restaurants within walking distance of residential neighborhoods. Front Street is the fourth business plaza, designed right into a residential neighborhood.
"Generally missing from master-planned communities is a business center where people can get professional services like your tax guy or landscape artist," said Steve Kellenberg, a partner at Edaw, an Irvine, Calif., business that helped plan Ladera Ranch. For decades, "we’ve organized land use in very singular uses. We didn’t want factories right next to homes, and we overreacted."
All the same, landowner Rancho Mission Viejo company, proceeded carefully.
"It may be too cutting-edge for some communities," said Paul Johnson, a senior vice president at the company, which still owns 23,000 undeveloped acres in Orange County. "But only by putting our toes in the water can we learn how far we can go in the future."
The hybrid structures were designed to appear as homes, in part as a hedge so that if the concept didn’t prove popular, the residences could still be marketed to conventional home buyers, said project manager Ralph Spargo, a general manager with Standard Pacific Homes, which built Front Street.
The commercial features are subtle. Spargo and Newport Beach architect David Kosco made the ground-floor windows, for example, large enough to serve as display windows. An artist or photographer could hang work samples on the walls in plain view from the street and advertise without explicitly doing so.
The shingles in the front of the homes that announce the resident businesses could as easily say "The Smiths" as "John Smith, Attorney at Law."
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