Casa Conejo, the first planned community in Newbury Park, opened in 1960, and tracts like Newbury Hills followed before the decade was out. Thousand Oaks went on to annex most of Newbury Park and much of the Westlake master-planned area in the late 1960s and 1970s. A federal housing study from 1970 describes how spillover from Los Angeles County drove a building surge across the county in the early 1960s. The result is a landscape of family houses from the same few decades, built for the way people lived then.
If your home dates from that wave, the closet is a natural place to start an update:
- Kids' rooms: a layout planned to change as children grow, from low rods to teenager-sized hanging.
- Primary closets: drawers, shoe shelving and double hanging that put a single long rod to shame.
- Garages: cabinets and a workbench, so weekend projects and sports gear have a place of their own.
- Spare rooms: a Murphy bed or built-in storage for the room that keeps changing jobs.