Fairhills Tract

Fairhills is 80 homes on 24 acres, laid out along seven streets and 0.88 miles of public street, with the boundary sitting 245 feet from Santiago Oaks Regional Park, 136 acres of county land with hiking and equestrian trails, a nature center and a playground. The residential ground is zoned for single family homes on 8,000 square feet, the median parcel measures 0.193 acres, and 0.6 acres inside the boundary is zoned to the Orange County Flood Control District.

The houses were drawn as eight designs by Claude Oakland and by Jones and Emmons, and the city's parcel survey names the OJ-1605 as the most common plan here, on 21 lots, followed by the OJ-1184 on 10 and the 1744R and OC-574 on 9 each. They are post and beam houses with floor to ceiling glass at the back, interior atriums on many plans, and a closed street face. Orange designated Fairhills a local historic district in 2019 with design standards attached. Every parcel here is assigned to Linda Vista Elementary, Santiago Charter Middle and El Modena High.

Fairhills is the last of Joseph Eichler's three Orange tracts and the one that never finished. Building began in 1964 on eight designs by Claude Oakland and by Jones and Emmons, against a plan for 183 houses in two phases. Demand ran below what the company expected while its finances were tightening, so the second phase was canceled and the graded ground sold off. About eighty houses stand where nearly two hundred were intended, which is why this is the smallest of the three and why it sits against open hillside rather than more of itself.

The street names break with the other two tracts and go Spanish and Mediterranean: Granada and San Remo for the cities, Valencia for the orange and the province both, Encanto meaning enchantment, Linda Vista meaning pretty view, Corrida meaning a run, and Elsinore. It is the only one of the three Eichler neighborhoods in Orange named this way.