Deb Aronson

There’s No Place Like Home

… with a 10-car garage, an elevator and 5,000 square feet of decking

First appeared in Illinois Alumni magazine in January 2006 under Profiles

First, you should know that architect Lori Naritoku ‘82 FAA, MARCH ‘84 FAA, was not too keen on this whole idea of talking about herself. What she does, she said, is not interesting.

“I just kind of like doing my own little thing,” Naritoku said. “It’s not a big deal.”

Here is the “little thing” that she does: Buy land; do architectural drawings for a single-family house; get the plans to pass strict community development boards; oversee the construction; design the furniture; do the flower arrangements; design the landscaping; handle the financing; then help sell the house.

Her current house will sell for more than $9 million dollars.

Yes, Naritoku is an architect. But saying that is like describing Clark Kent as just a reporter for the Daily Planet.

Whereas most architects are part of a large team comprising financial, structural and design experts, she does all these tasks and more.

Naritoku, who once had trouble choosing between biochemistry and fine arts (oil painting), finally settled on architecture late in her college career.

“I could do the math and science, but I always was a fine arts person,” she said. “Architecture is halfway, a nice mesh, between the sciences and the design.”

It was her master’s thesis that set Naritoku on her current path. For that project, she started with a site plan, designed a multi-family home and determined the cost of the project, the interest rate for borrowing the money and the feasibility of making a profit. This, give or take a few million dollars, is what she does now.

Naritoku credits her Illinois education for much of her “luck,” as she calls her success. For example, her Speech Communication 101 course helped her with public speaking, which she does in front of design review boards, as well as the times she’s been interviewed on television. Naritoku speaks Spanish every day on the job site, and she credits her high school and college classes for her fluency. The engineering part of Naritoku’s education enabled her to design and build a floating staircase in one of her homes, plus save close to $100,000 on at least one project by redesigning the home’s structural engineering.

After getting her degree, Naritoku bought and renovated a run-down house in Chicago for $148,000 with $15,000 down. She sold it a few years later for $700,000. Since then, Naritoku has built seven luxury homes in the coastal California towns of Laguna Beach and Newport Beach. She herself is an upper-crust vagabond, living on site as soon as a house is habitable. As soon as it sells, she and her two chow chows, Peanut and Chompers, head off to her next project.

“The thrill is in the building of it, not the living in it,” she said of her creations.

And to accomplish those creations, Naritoku has no permanent staff to help her, no bosses to oversee her and no clients to dictate to her, though she has a company, called Seacliffs Design Build Inc. She builds to suit her fancy, but invariably that fancy appeals to the multimillionaires who litter scenic and expensive California communities like Laguna Beach and Newport Beach like shells at ebb tide. She has no Web site or permanent office, she does not seek out clients. She doesn’t need to. They find her.

Her latest home — a four-story, 6,000-square-foot, single-family home in Laguna Beach — has a view of Emerald Bay from its top two floors. That square footage does not include the 4,000-square-foot subterranean, 10-car garage or the 5,000 square feet of decking and numerous balconies.

But while Naritoku thinks big, she also attends to small details. Each of the four bedrooms has tumbled travertine rock on at least part of every wall. In some of the bathrooms (each bedroom has one), the travertine goes all the way to the ceiling. Each bathroom, with leaded glass designed by Naritoku, also has a shower almost 6 square feet and four water lines — two for showerheads and two for handheld spray.

The game room has a billiard table, a bar, a subzero refrigerator and a dishwasher, an 800-bottle wine room, a 73-inch high-definition television and 14-foot ceilings. This level also offers a powder room for guests.

The main living area can be entered either via the internal stairway, the elevator or a curving outside staircase with elaborate, wrought-iron banisters. Twenty-foot-tall, coffered ceilings grace the foyer. As the best views are on this level, this is where Naritoku has put most of the living space, including the kitchen and living and dining rooms. This floor also has one of two laundry rooms in the house where’s the first laundry room and a powder room.

Above this floor is an enclosed deck level, where the ocean views can be fully appreciated. It also contains another bar and a powder room.

These opulent homes belie Naritoku’s own humble origins. Her parents, both Americans of Japanese descent, lost everything when they were put into relocation camps in the United States during World War II. Naritoku and her brother, Dean, a neuroscientist at Southern Illinois University (“he’s the brilliant one in the family,” Naritoku said of her sibling), grew up in the Chicago suburbs. Naritoku’s parents were florists who worked 60-hour weeks in their shop.

That hard work ethic has been passed down to Naritoku. She sleeps five hours a night, exercises almost three hours daily and has an unrivaled (she would say obsessive) attention to detail. Naritoku goes to the quarry and picks the stone. She goes to the landscaping company, tags individual trees and then oversees their planting. She once went to the welding shop several nights running to hand-place individual leaves for a two-story, wrought-iron banister. She has painted the interior of her current house six times. Meanwhile, she finds time for a boyfriend, a bevy of friends and a busy social life.

While the architect professes no particular design style — building both modern and traditional but always grand — every one of her houses contains an enormous kitchen with four ovens. That’s because Naritoku cooks and entertains like she builds — with both exquisite attention to detail and grand visions that she manages to pull off without breaking a sweat.

“She’s low-key until she gets a job to do,” said George Alexander, a longtime friend. “Like if you start talking to her about having dinner, it always starts out, ‘Oh, it’ll be very simple, we’ll just have a prime rib and some mashed potatoes,’ and suddenly it blossoms out — ‘Well, we’ll have crab legs for the first course and pasta,’ and it goes on, so there are 20 or 25 courses.

“Most of us think of having seven or eight people over for dinner, but we were just over at her house the other day, and she had a wine-tasting party for 50 people — and that was a small group.”

Naritoku, who owns dinnerware for 120, 18 chafing dishes and three enormous coffee urns, also cooked 20 racks of lamb, 25 pounds of prime rib (which she aged herself), tacitos, guacamole, and roasted vegetables for the wine tasting. She had a whole table just for desserts: cakes, pies and all kinds of different cookies. This was a small gathering; typically she hosts several hundred. Once she cooked prime rib, crab and other delicacies for an open house, which 975 people attended.

With her unflagging energy, Naritoku — all 5 feet 2 inches of her — soon will move on to another project. There’s no telling what style it will be, as she’s designed both modern and traditional dwellings, but two things are certain: Once again, it will be top-notch, and once again, she will demure.

“Everyone who meets her, when they are invited to her house, they are thunderstruck,” said Alexander. “She’s such an unassuming person, you’d never realize this is the sort of thing she’d even envision doing.

“It’s hard to believe someone that little can think that big.”