Quail Hill

Quail Hill is Planning Area 17 in the City of Irvine's own record, about 841 acres made up of 394 acres of medium density residential, 225 acres of preservation, 139 acres of research and industrial, 44 acres of recreation and 39 acres of community commercial. Planning Area 16 next door, which the city calls Quail Hill Open Space, adds 612 acres carrying no residential allocation at all. The General Plan caps the village at 2,539 dwelling units, or 2,659 once the 120 additive units are counted, a ceiling the City set rather than a count of what stands. Ownership runs in two layers: the City records a master, Quail Hill Master Association, run by FirstService Residential from 15241 Laguna Canyon Road on a mapped footprint of 500 acres, and beneath it nine sub-associations with their own managers, named Ambridge, Casalon, Ivy Wreath, Linden and Laurel, Sage East Village, Sage West Village, Sandalwood, Jasmine and Solstice.

Recreation inside the village is City-run and open to the public. Quail Hill Community Park covers about 16.9 acres at 35 Shady Canyon Drive with two lighted baseball fields, three soccer fields, two lighted basketball courts, a children's play area, an open play area, four restrooms and twelve picnic tables, open 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily, and Knollcrest Park adds 5 acres at 2065 Knollcrest with two tennis and two pickleball courts. Quail Hill Community Center opened beside the park in March 2017 with a 2,956 square foot multipurpose room and a 2,079 square foot classroom booked through the City. The 2.8-acre Quail Hill Trailhead sits at the end of Sand Canyon Road at the head of the Quail Hill Loop Trail, a two-mile natural surface trail open dawn to dusk and the only wilderness trail in the Irvine Ranch Natural Landmarks that allows dogs on leash. The village feeds Irvine Unified through Alderwood Elementary, whose campus at 2005 Knollcrest is the only school inside the boundary and whose assignment area is Quail Hill and Los Olivos, then Rancho San Joaquin Middle and University High.

The hill came before the houses and gave them the name. Quail Hill takes its name from a distinctive rock formation that adjoins about 600 acres of open space at the southern end of Irvine, on ground that was Rancho San Joaquin, the 48,803-acre Mexican land grant Jose Andres Sepulveda sold in 1864 after drought to the Flints, Llewellyn Bixby and James Irvine, and that became the lower half of the Irvine Ranch.

The village itself is recent. The Irvine Company dates it to 2003, and it was built as ten detached neighborhoods and four townhome neighborhoods by a set of builders including Pulte Homes, William Lyon Homes and Shea Homes rather than by one company. It was laid out around the landscape rather than over it, and the open space is the point: the village is bordered by the Irvine Open Space Preserve and by the Quail Hill Preserve, which the city puts at roughly 700 acres.