Downtown Attraction

It happens all the time. People drive through downtown Escondido, Calif., on Centre City Parkway and stop for the traffic light at West Second Avenue. Across the street they see City Square, a cluster of four-story, contemporary townhomes painted in brick, mustard, charcoal, sand, and cornflower blue. It doesn't look anything like all the other, mostly Spanish-style, buildings in the area.

“They're looking at this very different project,” says Larry Clemens, president of the urban division of Carlsbad, Calif.–based Barratt American, which developed and built City Square. “They come into our sales center and say they couldn't help themselves. They just had to come in.”

Nothing could thrill Clemens more than to hear that kind of comment. The contemporary architecture of the project marked a major departure from the traditional look of the city's downtown buildings—and raised more than a few concerns. But at the same time, the city was battling the familiar issues of downtown decline and was looking for ways to bring it back to life. City Square is located on the former site of an abandoned dry cleaning company.

“Escondido is very enamored with revitalizing the urban core, but the idea of developing residential in their downtown was very foreign to them,” Clemens says. “They wanted to lean on the territory they knew best, which was a conservative town-home project they were familiar with. We convinced them what they needed to do with downtown was to make it a new place. … It was a departure for them, but they took our lead and allowed us to step out with some very different architecture and to put color into the mix that they never would have dreamed of doing. Because of our stepping out, being a little different than the surrounding area, when [buyers] walk in, it's a big wow.”

DESIGNER DENSITY: Careful site plan development and a strong color palette give City Square a dramatic streetscape that integrates the project with the surrounding downtown amenities.

In this case, being different helped. The grand opening of the models in June 2007 drew more than 500 people. Within a month, the entire first phase of 18 units, with prices ranging from the high $300,000s to the mid-$500,000s, was sold out.

As always, location played a central role in the project's success. City Square is a block from Grand Avenue, historic downtown Escondido's main street. It's within easy walking distance of restaurants, boutiques, art galleries, and theaters.

A classic urban infill project, City Square's success depended on the ability to achieve both high density and a feeling of openness. The site plan calls for 102 units on slightly more than 3.5 acres. To accomplish that goal, Irvine, Calif.–based architect KTGY Group used tandem garages for each unit to decrease the garage-door mass on the elevations, and a stacking design for the units.

“The tandem garage routine really gets the density up there at the right price,” says architect Jirair Garabedian . “It keeps the cost of concrete out of the structure of a big garage.”

The garages for plans 1 and 3, for example, are side by side. Both of the homes' foyers are on the first floor; plan 1's living space is directly above both homes' garages. Owners of plan 3 take two flights of stairs to their living space, which encompasses the third and fourth floors. As a result, both plans get full use of the space above the pair of garages, providing “a nice open feel when you come up,” Garabedian says, as well as generous room for living and dining functions, and private outdoor space through the use of decks and balconies. Plus, the first-floor foyer (and den in plan 2B) offers space for a home office or study.

“It's complicated construction,” Clemens says. “It's like putting a puzzle together with spaces from one unit overlaying space of another unit. As a result, it's very efficient and provides large rooms. … It's not for the faint of heart. You have to think through noise attenuation when you have a person's bedroom over the garage of someone else's unit. When the automatic garage door opens, you don't want it vibrating. It really takes some thinking. Our salespeople have learned to speak architectural talk.”

Barratt American's marketing efforts were designed to build a strong tie between the project and downtown Escondido and give local residents a chance to see City Square firsthand, says Lenette Hewitt, vice president of sales and marketing for Barratt American's urban division.

“For our model grand opening, I felt like I was working on The Apprentice, trying to think of anything we could do,” Hewitt says. As a result, the model grand opening was timed to coincide with Cruisin' Grand, a weekly Friday night classic car event in the spring and summer that draws thousands of people to downtown. Barratt American was a sponsor for Cruisin' Grand the night before the grand opening and hired pedal-cabs to shuttle visitors from Grand Avenue to City Square.

For the grand opening, City Square hosted Downtown Escondido Day, a community street fair with live bands, local artists, tastings from area restaurants and wineries, raffles, and other fun events.

“It was really great,” Hewitt says. “About 530 people came to the event. Traffic stayed real steady, about 100 a week for a month after that, and it's still at about 50 a week.”

Another key to the project's success, Hewitt says, is the model merchandising, which is both high style and accessible.

COLOR OF SUCCESS: Organic living was the merchandising theme for plan 1, the smallest of City Square's three units. The project's contemporary design inspired the model merchandisers to use fun, hip colors.

“A lot of the designers do things the homeowner could never do,” she says. “If you're buying a first home, you would never have a pillow with a piece of fabric that matches the window coverings and the bottom of the bar stool. … Everything in the models feels very attainable. Except for a few custom pillows here and there, there isn't an over-the-top feel to it. It's a clean, realistic feel.”

All the bedding is retail, and the furniture came from a local store with which Barratt American did a cross-promotion. Clemens says it has helped prospective buyers visualize themselves living at City Square. “You walk in and feel like you're at home,” he says. “That was a major home run for us.”

That happened because Barratt got all the consultants together on the front end to discuss the architecture, the target buyer, and what made the project unique, says interior designer Kimberly Sandoval, senior creative manager at Creative Design Consultants in Costa Mesa, Calif. She knew that the price point and the contemporary architecture would attract professionals—some singles, some couples, and some roommates—and very few children.

“The contemporary exterior drove the thoughts for the interior,” Sandoval says. “We wanted to promote an attainable design to potential buyers. We like to combine custom design with retail. People can relate to that.”

The retail stores incorporated into the design included Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma, both recognized for high quality and clean, upscale design. At the same time, Sandoval wanted to give buyers a design sense to which to aspire. “We did commission a faux artist to do some beautiful touches,” Sandoval says. “A buyer goes into a room, sees two-tone paint and thinks, ‘I could do that.' ” The design of the units and the strength of the exterior color palette made it easy to use “fun, hip, contemporary colors,” such as lemon yellow, sapphire, chocolate, charcoal, and linen, she says. “KTGY did such an amazing job of utilizing the space, it made all the furniture layouts work great,” she says. “It … made it easy to design. I've definitely worked on projects where I didn't know what we were going to do. These laid out very, very well.”

If there was one surprise in the project, it was the number of older buyers. Barratt had expected to draw mainly commuters who wanted to get closer to work in San Diego. Instead, it attracted significant interest from over-50 locals who were ready to transition from large, high-maintenance homes to a smaller space closer to the amenities of downtown Escondido.

The big drawback for older buyers was the number of stairs they needed to climb in the largest and most popular unit, plan 3. That plan has its entrance on the first floor and requires walking all the way up to the third floor to enter the unit. Then, there's another flight of stairs to the master bedroom.

As a result, City Square's second phase will offer a personal elevator as an option for plan 3. Quiet, nicely decorated, and large enough to carry three or four people comfortably, the elevator option “will be the answer for those who wanted to buy, but for the stairs,” Clemens says. “We're contacting them now to tell them, ‘Your dream has come true.' ”

Pricing for phase 2, which is under construction now, has gone up by $3,000 to $6,000 per unit, except for the plan 3 with the elevator option, which will run an extra $25,000 to $30,000.

“We knew we needed to raise pricing a little to make the phase 1 people happy, but not so much to be out of the market,” Hewitt says. “At Barratt, we've been really, really conscious of not slashing and burning prices. It's not fair to the people who already bought, and it devalues the community.”

URBAN CHIC: The soaring two-story living room gives buyers the sense of a much larger space in plan 3, the largest unit at City Square, at 1,903 square feet.