Esmeralda — URBAN FIELD

Creating village urbanism in Cloverdale, California

Esmeralda Master Plan, Specific Plan, and Objective Design Standards

Years
Ongoing

Client
Esmeralda Land Company, LLC

Services provided
Masterplanning
Streetscape Design
Specific Plan
Design Standards & Guidelines

Collaborators
Bionic Landscape Architecture
Sherwood Design Engineers
Fehr&Peers

Urban Field Team
Jane Lin
Ryan Call
John Bela
Anne Lin

A 266-acre former industrial site along the Russian River, at the southern edge of Cloverdale, had carried a development entitlement for twenty years that allowed retail, office space, a golf course, and light industrial uses spread across a conventional suburban layout.

Urban Field worked with the project's multidisciplinary design team to reimagine what the site could be instead: a compact village organized around walkable streets, a central piazza, woodland groves, and the land's own topography. The site planning centered on prioritizing people on foot and bike over cars.

Urban Field sat at the center of the project's multidisciplinary team — translating the big-picture vision into the technical language of the Specific Plan and Objective Design Standards, while making sure that vision itself held together as a place people would actually want to walk through. The result had to work on two levels at once: specific and measurable enough to guide construction, and cohesive enough to still feel like one village when built out by different builders over many years.

The team is now working to bring an updated version of that plan through approval. It’s a plan that uses less water and provides more public access than what's already entitled on the site.

Together, the Specific Plan and ODS create a regulatory framework that protects the core intent of the master plan while allowing flexibility, architectural diversity, and evolution as Esmeralda is built out over time.