Laguna Niguel - Beacon Hill
- Thread starter LAtoOC
- Start date
davenlei
New member
LAtoOC said:
There are quite a few nice communities there and Beacon Hill is one of them. We live in a community very near Beacon (I don't want to disclose in public). It all depends on what you are looking for and at what price point. The things I like about living in that area is that you are 3 miles from Dana Point harbor, very close to shopping/banks/restaurants (Trader Joes, Ralphs, Block Buster, Banks, Five Guys, Chipotle, etc, etc.), near tons of really cool running/biking trails. The fact that it is so close to the beach gives you the beach micro climate including the marine layer which comes in and blankets the area.
It is nice that you are far enough from the freeway that you don't hear it at all if you are sensitive to background road noise. It is dead quiet at night (unless you back to a big street). Another nice thing is you feel like you live in a resort area (which you kinda are with the Ritz-Carlton, St. Regis and The Montage just a hop, skip and jump away).
Regarding schools, there are 3-4 Montessori schools around the area but we still take our kids to the ones in Irvine just because they already went there, we work in Irvine and the kids make good car-pool buddies.
Regarding public schools, the are excellent (on par with Irvine API's) but they are not all in that same league. There are some neighborhoods which have poor scores and you need to figure out where those are to avoid them. I believe Beacon and San Marino feed into Malcolm Elementary (932 API for 2011) which is a great school. George White (915 API for 2011) is also an excellent school and I believe Marina Hills, Bear Brand and a few other areas feed into that school.
Most of the homes in that area feed into Dana Hills High school which is a good school too and seems to be well rounded.
If you have any questions, let me know.