There’s a before-and-after of a beachfront property in Newport Beach making its way around Instagram, and it’s worth a discussion. Like Rancho Santa Fe, Newport Beach has building regulations. But the Ranch has something Newport Beach doesn’t: an Art Jury. Its job isn’t simply to determine whether a project meets the rules. It’s also to ask the harder questions – about scale, harmony, rural character, and ultimately, whether a home belongs where it’s being built.
Rancho Santa Fe has about 1,800 parcels within the Covenant, and that number does not grow. Every large, gracious lot in the Ranch is, in the truest sense, a finite thing. Which is precisely what makes them attractive to people who build for a living and sell for a profit.
The Court of Public Opinion
The Instagram post illustrates the discussion.
Before: a shingled beach cottage, white and modest, tucked on a double corner lot.
After: a structure of curved wood and glass, and enough of it to suggest the new owners either have nothing to hide, or a very generous definition of privacy after dark.
The Instagram post calls it a transformation. Hundreds of comments later, most readers seemed to have landed somewhere closer to loss.
“What was once a charming and historic beach cottage is now a Range Rover showroom?”
“Yikes! I really like the OG. Wish that style was part of the remake because I’m sure the new build was trying to max sq. ft. for lot size but like… no charm,” wrote one commenter. Another wrote, “Tear down? The existing house looks far better and is actually human scale. New looks sterilized and institutional, no character and out of scale.”
“The builder can only say one thing: that the client loves it. They literally can’t defend the design with one other point. Not materials, scale, beauty, charm, improvement in the neighborhood… nothing. They checked off one box and ignored the other 99.”
Whether you agree with those comments is beside the point. Hundreds of strangers, looking at the same two photographs, instinctively began asking the very questions Rancho Santa Fe’s Art Jury was created to ask nearly a century ago.
What Stands Between Us and That Photo
Unlike Rancho Santa Fe’s Art Jury, Newport Beach relies primarily on a municipal planning process. It determines what may be built, but not necessarily whether it belongs. That’s how a beach cottage becomes something closer to a boutique hotel lobby while meeting every regulation.
Lately, the Ranch has developed a recognizable architectural formula: stone, glass, giant-sized doors and a barrel tile roof checking the obligatory Latin box. The homes satisfy the Covenant’s building regulations, but somewhere along the way classic Ranch design gave way to the math. Clients see what the last one sold for, build the same formula, and hope lightning strikes twice.
There’s nothing wrong with contemporary architecture or building a large home. But there’s a difference between designing a home for a place and designing one for a pro forma. That’s precisely why the Art Jury exists – not simply to determine whether a project complies with the Protective Covenant, but whether it contributes to the character the Covenant was written to preserve.
Newport Beach didn’t wake up one morning and decide it wanted a house the internet would compare to a Range Rover showroom. Communities rarely change that way. They change one approval at a time.
Rancho Santa Fe has spent nearly a century asking a different question before the concrete is poured: Does it belong here?
Kelli Hillard is editor of the RSF Post and a former member of the Rancho Santa Fe Art Jury.