City Shows Its Colors : Thousand Oaks Bends Rules by OKing New Building Hues

THOUSAND OAKS — From the look of things, some buildings in this city--once painted in somber, sometimes monotonous, earthen hues--have gotten a bit flashy.

The intersection of Westlake and Thousand Oaks boulevards is one example.

On one side of Westlake Boulevard, the popular Club Disney is festooned with a sandstone and white checkerboard pattern. Across the street, the still unfinished Northgate Shopping Plaza is punctuated by a central tower wrapped in a similar diamond-like design--painted in mustard yellow and burnt orange.

It’s enough to make one wonder if the city has loosened its once critical building standards.

Not quite, officials say.

“We’re not easing up on any of our standards,” City Planner Bob Rickards said. “We just look at each development on a case-by-case basis and we’ve found these to be acceptable.”

But that wasn’t always the case.

Last February, when the very first Club Disney decorated the crown of its building with a checkerboard pattern without permission, the city’s Planning Commission thought the entertainment complex had gone goofy.

And, according to some commissioners, residents filed a slew of complaints arguing that the city had broken with its long-standing tradition of strictly supervised development.

But in April, Phil Gatch, planning department director, approved a permit filed by Club Disney to keep the pattern. It seems to have started a trend.

A spokesman for Dave Dollinger, the San Francisco-based developer of the Northgate project, would not comment on whether they followed Disney’s example. But he did say the design distinguishes the plaza.

“First of all, we wouldn’t do anything that the city hadn’t already approved, and secondly, it’s appropriate,” he said. “It may sound over the top, but the design fits right in.” According to Rickards, the design permit for Dollinger’s plaza was approved in May, with little discussion as to whether it complied with city standards. The plaza is expected to open by late summer.

But Mike Sangster, assistant director of the Planning Department, said that in recent years both planners and commissioners have been more daring when ruling on possibly objectionable building designs.

“I think the commissioners and the planners have been more flexible than we were years ago,” Sangster said, adding that building codes passed more than 30 years ago aren’t always used as the absolute measure for a future development’s design.

“But they still have to meet some pretty strict criteria,” he said.