Neighborhoods
Before Irvine was a city, it was a plan — and University Park was its first proof. Post-and-beam homes on greenbelts, still walkable, still buyable.
The story
William Pereira's 1963 master plan gave UC Irvine its wheel-shaped campus — and wrapped a brand-new kind of city around it, laid out as villages before a single resident arrived.
University Park came first. Construction began in 1965: clusters of homes facing shared greenbelts instead of the street, cul-de-sacs opening onto central greens, and a landscape plan from Peter Walker's team at Sasaki, Walker and Associates that landscape historians still study.
The houses match the plan — flat and shed roofs, post-and-beam structure, walls of glass onto private patios. Roughly two thousand of them, threaded through more than forty acres of greenbelt.
The first villages
Five villages made up original Irvine. Two of them matter most to a modern-architecture buyer.
Irvine's first village and its most intact modernist fabric — greenbelt living minutes from UCI, with patio homes and townhomes that still read as drawn.
Irvine listings →The early hillside village, including the circa-1969 Turtle Rock Hills homes credited to modernist Richard Leitch — views, and a step up in scale.
Irvine listings →Buying here
Honest framing: this is late-1960s modernism, not the 1950s kind — and its greatest asset is the plan itself. The greenbelts, the school-centered villages, the walkability people pay a premium for across Irvine? University Park is where it was invented.
Association rules govern exterior changes in much of the village — a quiet preservation force, and something to read closely before you buy or remodel.
On the market now
Straight from the MLS, drawn against the actual University Park boundary — not a citywide radius. Every card links to the full listing.
Checking the MLS…
Small tracts trade quietly — the good ones are often gone in a weekend. Leave your email and we’ll flag new University Park listings when they hit the MLS. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Contact
Original-condition homes in University Park and early Turtle Rock move fast and price oddly. Stacey watches both.
