Orchard Hills

Orchard Hills is Planning Area 1 in the City of Irvine's own planning layer, 4,161 acres on the city's northern edge, and more than 500 acres inside it are working avocado orchards the master plan kept rather than graded. The village is laid out as four neighborhoods terraced up the hillside above the groves, three of them behind gates. Three public trails run wholly inside the boundary and total 3.1 miles by the city's own mileage, all three single-track: Orchard Hills Upper Loop at 1.5 miles, Orchard Hills Lower Loop at 1.2, and Changalas Pass at 0.4, which carries the name of the grower the Irvine Company credits with 26 years of maintaining the orchards.

Recreation here belongs to the associations rather than to the village. The Groves carries two private recreation centers, Resort at the Groves with a club room and a Junior Olympic pool and Meadows at the Groves with a lap pool, plus Hideaway Park. The Reserve carries three private parks, where Crestview Park holds Junior Olympic and wading pools with a club room, Terrace View Park adds a lap pool and a basketball half court, and Piazza Park offers lawn and shade instead of water. Summit adds two private parks of its own, and Settlers Park at 35 Settlers Way, 6.04 acres, is the only City of Irvine public park inside the boundary. The village spans two school districts: Orchard Hills School, a TK-8 Tustin Unified campus at 11555 Culver Drive, stands inside it and the developer names it with Beckman High for the Groves, while the Irvine Unified assignment runs Canyon View Elementary into Sierra Vista Middle and on to Northwood High.

The hills in the name are the Lomas de Santiago, the range the Irvine Ranch took in when it bought the 47,000-acre Rancho Lomas de Santiago in 1866, and the orchard in the name is still being farmed. Most of the avocado grove above the village went in during the 1970s and early 1980s, and by the 1990s it had grown into the nation's number one supplier of avocados. It is still around 920 acres of Hass, roughly 100,000 trees, with about 4,000 new ones planted every year to keep the grove that size, run by Irvine Valencia Growers under Pete Changala, the Irvine Company's vice president of agricultural operations, whose grandfather and father were tenant farmers. Hikers on the trails above the houses are on dirt roads that were worked by cattle and cowboys before anyone picked an avocado here.

The houses came late, and the high school came first. Northwood High opened in 1999 in a narrow valley in these foothills, on a site the Irvine Company's 1960 master plan had set aside for a high school from the beginning, and at the time it stood surrounded by working groves with no village around it. The village itself dates to 2014 by the Irvine Company's own reckoning, with the first neighborhoods delivered from about 2013 and construction still going in the Summit at the top of the hill. The idea behind the plan was not to clear the ranch and start over. More than 500 acres of working avocado orchard were kept inside the community rather than graded, and the land plan was terraced into the existing ridgelines and open space around a reservoir. JZMK Partners set the architecture on Tuscan, Provence, Northern Italian and Formal Spanish precedents, which is why the tracts here carry names like Capella, Messina, Terrazza, Trevi, Varenna and Vicenza.