Corsican Villas

Corsican Villas holds 252 addresses on 25.4 acres, and the naming inside it is absolute: every one of its fourteen street names ends in the word wood. Archwood carries 58 homes across an avenue and a court, then Honeywood, Gatewood, Charwood, Ironwood, Elkwood, Breezewood, Dogwood, Oldwood, Norwood, Leafwood, Pennywood, Jaywood and Merrywood, most of them holding ten to twenty-six each. The parcel layer counts 258 parcels inside the boundary, every one residential, on lots running to a median of 0.035 acres with structures to a median of 1,302 square feet and three bedrooms.

Those lots are the smallest of any of the 43 communities the City of Brea maps, tied with Country Road on the other side of town, and the pattern that produces them is the attached and clustered housing the general plan carries as Medium Density Residential across 22.6 acres. None of the boundary falls in an elevated fire class. Corsican Villas is one of four Brea neighborhoods served by La Habra City Elementary and Fullerton Joint Union High rather than by Brea Olinda: Sierra Vista Elementary is 0.65 miles away with 467 students, Washington Middle 0.88 miles with 580, and La Habra High 2.01 miles with 1,881.

The Kavanaugh Development Company built Corsican Villas between 1972 and 1975, and the city records 252 homes here on twenty-five acres, most of them going up between 1973 and 1976. The typical home measures about 1,302 square feet on a lot of roughly a thirtieth of an acre, in four floor plans, which is the classic Southern California townhome format of that decade.

The name looks to the Mediterranean and the streets look to an English wood. Every one of the fourteen inside the boundary ends in the same syllable: Archwood, Breezewood, Charwood, Dogwood, Elkwood, Foxwood, Honeywood, Ironwood, Jaywood, Kerrwood, Leafwood, Merrywood, Norwood, Oldwood, Pennywood and Tanglewood. Birch Street on the north edge is itself an oil name, since it was called Brea-Olinda Road before it was renamed for Albert Otis Birch of the Birch Oil Company, one of the operators working the field.