Faire Marin

Faire Marin covers 16.2 acres measured against the city's published boundary and holds 83 residential addresses among the 86 the address layer records inside the line. Only one address carries a unit designator and the assessor classes all 83 dwellings as single-family residential. Four named streets serve them across 0.50 miles: Shorebreak Drive, Whitecap Lane, Santa Barbara Lane and Stillwater Drive. The boundary fills 98.1 percent of its own convex hull.

The homes are large for the lot they sit on. The assessor's median building is 3,920 square feet with a tenth to ninetieth percentile band of 3,324 to 4,379, on a median lot of 6,000 square feet, and 54 of the 83 dwellings carry a pool, which is close to two in three. City zoning reads 79.0 percent residential low density and the general plan designates all of it the same. The whole boundary sits inside the city's Coastal Zone appeal jurisdiction, in appeal zone 1. Humboldt Beach lies within 250 meters, and the bus stop layer records no stop inside the boundary or within that distance.

Faire Marin is one of the last pieces of Huntington Harbour to be built, and it stands on ground that did not exist before the dredges arrived. The Lomita Gun Club was founded on these sloughs in 1903 and at least thirteen duck clubs once worked the surrounding marsh. In 1960 Lewis W. Douglas Jr. of Christiana Oil Corporation began planning a residential marina across 860 acres of swamps and sloughs and hired the architect William L. Pereira to master plan it. Construction began in 1963 at a reported 200 million dollars, and the Huntington Harbour Yacht Club followed in 1965.

All 83 homes here were finished between 1984 and 1989, roughly two decades after the dredges started cutting the channels, on about 16 acres. That late date puts Faire Marin in a different architectural world from the harbor's early ranch houses, and the streets carry surf and water names rather than the Yale college names Douglas used in the older sections. Shorebreak Drive, Whitecap Lane, Stillwater Drive and Santa Barbara Lane make up the whole plan.