Lambert Ranch is a new development that is being built by The New Home Company. It is located/surrounded by Portola Springs and here is a rough idea of the location (click for a bigger image):
The grand opening is on April 28th, 2012 but they had a private preview event this past weekend. There are a few members in the TI forums who visited and had some feedback:
Just got back. Checked out The Grove (starting at $1.2 M). Lots are small. Approx 6000 sq ft with about 4300 sq ft in living space. Yard is practically nonexistent. The tour guide was focusing on the “courtyard” as the yard. Love the downstairs for the most part, love the kitchen island in all floor plans and the great room. Also like the casita (Plan 3 has a HUGE separate casita). Upstairs left much to be desired. All secondary bedrooms are rather small. Master bedroom itself is also rather small, bathrooms are decent size.
Also, you can see the 241 from the models as well as the landfill.
The Hills start at the low mil. Bedrooms are a tad bigger than The Grove bedrooms but again, rather small.
Overall impression, decent floor plans but would not buy there because of the price and location.
They have one rec room for the association called the “ranch house” with pool and ping pong table. No tennis courts. I guess ping pong for the asians? 😉
Having looked at 100+ model homes over the past several years in Southern California, these are some of the most impressive I've seen. The Hill was nice, but the Grove was quite unique. What's great about these model homes is that every floorplan is different from every other floorplan in the community, unlike Laguna Altura, for example, which are variations on each other, and were exactly the same as floorplans used in other Irvine Pacific developments. As a group, the homes in Lambert Ranch are quite large as well, something else that is unique in today's economy. Will these sell? Who knows. But, if someone's looking for something new and something of this size in Irvine, it's about the only option available. With Orchard Hills MIA for the foreseeable future (and certainly not opening in 2013 as was advertised on the Irvine Company website a couple years ago), I don't know what else may be in the pipeline that may offer something of similar size or quality in the central OC area.
Any thoughts from anyone else who visited?
Discuss below or on the active TI thread.
Kalbi sounds like a buyer, Arman sounds like a realtor.
It will be interesting to see how it goes — for those of us not enlightened enough to understand Orange County mystique, it seems silly expense.