When Richard Reese first saw “Plano Trabuco” in southeastern Orange County around 1980, he thought it was “the most beautiful place for a new community I can possibly imagine.”
Standing on a mountain top with a crew of planners and engineers, Reese gazed upon a mile-wide plain stretching 5 miles long, filled with mature sycamores and oaks with a view of Saddleback Mountain in the distance.
A life-long urban planner tasked with forming a plan for Rancho Mission Viejo, Reese then turned to his companions and suggested they say a prayer.
They needed to ask “that God will somehow give us the opportunity to do something worthy of this place,” he told an interviewer with the Cal State Fullerton Center for Oral and Public History 20 years later.
That place eventually became the city of Rancho Santa Margarita, and Reese was the town’s chief visionary.
In the years that followed, that cattle pasture sprouted homes and shopping centers, along with schools, parks, sports fields, trails and a library. It’s now home to 48,000 people.
As the community developed, city leaders kept consulting with Reese to make sure they were sticking to his vision for an “urban village” filled with gathering places so people could live fuller, connected lives.
The town eventually named a street after him — Richard Reese Way — and the mayor called him “the heart and soul of this community.”
The city’s ability to consult with the city’s master planner ended on Tuesday, Aug. 29, when Reese died after a brief illness. He was 95.
“He had big ideas that people could live better if they live close to nature,” said Reese’s widow, Linda Hudson.
Rancho Santa Margarita Mayor Jerry Holloway called Reese “one of the smartest and nicest men I’ve ever met.”
Reese didn’t just design the town, which became an incorporated city in 2000. He lived there, taking daily hikes around Rancho Santa Margarita Lake.
“He is known by so many people, not only because of his vision and the architecture and all that. But he lives on the lake. He was always visible, always talking to people,” Holloway said. “He’s always been active. He’s always been interested. … We were constantly talking to him to make sure that (we were following) his original concept.”
Rancho Mission Viejo Chairperson and Chief Executive Tony Moiso, Reese’s former boss, said his vision resulted in “one of the premier master-planned communities in the region.”
“All of us at Rancho Mission Viejo are saddened by Richard’s passing,” Moiso said in a statement. “Richard’s creative impact – his footprints on the land – will endure forever.”
Reese was born Nov. 18, 1927, in Glendale, the youngest of six children.
He graduated from the University of Southern California in 1954 with a degree in architecture but also studied landscape architecture, city planning, urban design, planning and zoning law and public administration.
“Little did I realize at the time that I was going to go into all of them,” he told the Oral History Center.
He worked as a private planning consultant and prepared master plans for cities throughout Southern California, including Claremont and Covina.
He worked as planning director for the city of Anaheim from 1957 through 1964, and then went to work as master planner for the Irvine Co., Orange County’s largest landowner.
Overseeing a staff of 50, Reese recalled that he developed the concept of creating an urban village while working on designs for the Woodbridge, Turtle Rock, University Park, Tustin Meadows and Harbor View communities.
“It’s really where the concept of villages got its start in my mind,” he told the Oral History Center. “Villages that have open space and gathering places.”
After 15 years, he started working for Rancho Mission Viejo, another large landholder that at one time owned all of Camp Pendleton and much of south Orange County.
Reese said he was working on a master plan for the entire ranch, but increasingly began focusing on the new concept of building a new master-planned community. The goal was to get government approvals, and then sell the land to a developer.
Then, a recession hit, and Moiso said: “We can either hang it up and wait ’til the end of the recession, or we can go ahead and start working on it ourselves.”
A deep thinker with technical skills, Reese used the wonky term, “lifestyle enhancement opportunity” to describe what he hoped to create.
Early advertisements put it more simply, calling Rancho Santa Margarita “a town designed for life.”
Four main areas emerged from Reese’s early blueprints: the East Lake Village, the Golf Course Village, the Hillside Village and the Town Center.
A central park and stage are at the heart of the community, but all of the facilities would work as gathering centers. Schools, shopping centers, the library, plazas and community rooms were designed to work as meeting places. A linear system of trails and parkways linked them all together.
“Richard designed our great city to be a small city with the soul of a village, and he succeeded,” councilmember Tony Beall said in a Facebook post.
The lake at the north end of town was inspired by Reese’s favorite painting: “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat. The painting depicts crowds gathered on the bank of Paris’ River Seine on a sunny Sunday.
Rancho Santa Margarita’s Grande Jatte turned out to be Reese’s favorite spot, and he referred to his favorite lakeside bench as “serenity circle,” Hudson, his widow, recalled.
Reese and Hudson made friends from 30 countries during their walks around the lake.
This week, Hudson left a bouquet of flowers and a sign on the bench. Residents began leaving Post-It Notes on the bench sharing their thoughts.
“One of the joys I get walking around the lake is hearing all of the different languages that people are speaking, both walking and on the patios of the housing next to the lake,” Reese told the Oral History Center. “Every time I hear that, I feel successful, that somehow it happened. I think it happened because you create a place called community.”
The family plans to hold a private memorial for Reese on Saturday.
He is survived by Hudson; his son and daughter-in-law John and Kathy; and his daughter, Julianne.
