The Walnut Village tower building.

Out of more than 300 entries in more than 40 categories, Walnut Village received gold in the “Best Small (up to 200 units) Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC) On the Boards” category. It also received silver in the“Best Direct Mail Campaign for a 50+ Housing Community” award category.

Upon awarding the project, the NAHB judges wrote that the project “is a nicely executed design of a CCRC on a small site. The project offers a nice progression of aging in place through separation of resident uses tied together with a network of common areas complimented by creative active and passive outdoor spaces.”

Brian Smith, project manager with Newport Beach-based DPR Construction Inc., says winning the design award means a lot considering the architect was located out of state during the construction process.

“Getting consultants to the site to look at issues required careful planning ahead,” Smith adds. “We organized weekly on-site meetings and notifi ed the consultants up to a week ahead to let them know who needed to attend those meetings based on issues that we were working on.”

Ebert says that although design people were on location about three days a week, the distance definitely made things interesting.

“We just couldn’t run over to the job site for 20 minutes or an hour,” he says. “There was a lot of use of digital media and digital photos to send information back and forth when we weren’t on site. And we did a lot of conference calling.”

But the project’s biggest construction challenge wasn’t long distance planning. It was building three stories of wood frame structures and two courtyards with landscaping and fountains over the parking garage with post-tension concrete decks, Smith says.

“Once the decks are tensioned they deflect, which is expected, but it can vary,” he adds. “So when you are all done with construction, you don’t have a perfectly flat deck to build a wood structure on.”

Ebert agrees.

“Once the decks are cast it is tough to go back through if you missed something and you don’t want to be poking holes in it because you could hit supports,” he says. “It took a lot of effort to make sure that everything that needed to be in that concrete was there before it was poured.”