High above the Pacific, where the hills of Newport Coast roll down toward the ocean, sits one of Southern California’s most storied luxury enclaves: Pelican Hill. Part golf resort, part guard-gated residential community, Pelican Hill has long been synonymous with the kind of understated, old-world elegance that defines the best of Orange County living.
A Resort-Anchored Community
Pelican Hill is a 24-hour guard-gated community of custom-built estates sitting at the top of the Newport Coast hills, positioned directly above the Pelican Hill Golf Club and the Resort at Pelican Hill. The neighborhood was conceived as a signature residential companion to the resort below, and both trace back to the Irvine Company’s development of Newport Coast beginning in the mid-1990s. Pelican Hill is part of a broader family of Pelican-branded enclaves — including Pelican Crest, Pelican Ridge, Pelican Point, and Pelican Heights, along with the later Pelican Ridge Estates — that grew up alongside the resort’s development. Together these communities comprise a relatively small number of homes; Pelican Hill itself is generally described as comprising roughly 140 custom estate lots, which helps explain why so few properties ever come to market at once.
The golf club dates to 1991, conceived from the outset as part of the resort project, with the Resort at Pelican Hill itself opening in late 2008. The club and spa have long carried a reputation among the finest in the state. In 2012, Condé Nast Traveler’s Readers’ Choice awards recognized Pelican Hill Golf Club as California’s top golf resort (published in the magazine’s April 2012 issue, based on 2011 survey results) and, separately, named The Spa at Pelican Hill California’s top resort spa in its June 2012 Spa Poll — so the golf course and spa earned their number-one California rankings through two distinct Condé Nast Traveler surveys published months apart in the same year, rather than a single joint award. The two 18-hole courses, Ocean South and Ocean North, span 36 holes designed by Tom Fazio and remain the centerpiece of the community’s identity, having also earned recognition over the years from Golf Digest and Golf Magazine.
Architecture and Estates
Homes in Pelican Hill draw their design language primarily from Mediterranean, Tuscan, and French European traditions, and estates typically run from roughly 5,000 to 10,000 square feet or more — with some of the community’s largest homes exceeding 13,000 square feet. Nearly every property is a one-of-a-kind custom build, often featuring grand entryways, guest casitas, wine cellars, infinity-edge pools, motor courts, and seamless indoor-outdoor living spaces designed to take full advantage of the setting.
And the setting is the point. Views stretch across the Pacific Ocean, Catalina Island, Newport Harbor, and the fairways of the golf course below, with many homes catching city lights toward Palos Verdes on clear nights.
Interestingly, by design there’s no community pool or clubhouse inside Pelican Hill itself. Since nearly every estate has its own private pool and entertaining space, the developers kept the neighborhood’s amenities estate-focused rather than centered on shared facilities — a structure that also tends to keep HOA dues comparatively modest for a neighborhood at this price point, since there’s less common infrastructure to maintain.
A Tight, Expensive Micro-Market
Pelican Hill remains one of the tightest and most expensive micro-markets in Newport Beach, though exactly how tight and how expensive depends on which snapshot in time you’re looking at — this is a market with only a handful of transactions in any given month, so the numbers swing more than in a typical neighborhood. Redfin’s most recent listing count for the immediate Pelican Hill subdivision shows roughly 15 luxury homes on the market at a median list price of about $16.75 million. A broader look at closed sales tells a similar story of a market moving briskly at the very top: Redfin data for the neighborhood showed a median sale price around $13 million in a recent month, up nearly 9 percent year over year, with a median price per square foot in the low $2,000s and homes typically taking three to four months to sell. Separate data compiled by Movoto put the December 2025 median list price at $23.9 million, or about $2,250 per square foot — a reminder that “median list” and “median sale” figures, and the exact set of active listings captured on any given day, can diverge substantially in a market this thin.
Individual listings illustrate the spread: current inventory in and around Pelican Hill has included estates priced from the mid-teens of millions up past $39 million for the community’s largest homes, with square footage ranging from roughly 7,800 to more than 13,000. It’s a community built for those who want resort living as a daily backdrop rather than an occasional getaway, with the Pacific Ocean, Catalina Island, and championship fairways as a permanent view from the backyard — even if the precise median price on any given week depends on exactly which handful of estates happen to be listed that day.
The Resort Below
Much of Pelican Hill’s identity is inseparable from the resort it sits above. Set on roughly 504 acres along the coast between Newport Beach and Laguna Beach, the Resort at Pelican Hill was designed with an Italian Renaissance sensibility inspired by the architect Andrea Palladio, and its accommodations are split between 204 bungalow guest rooms and suites and 128 two-, three-, and four-bedroom villas tucked into a terraced hillside. Its amenities include the Andrea restaurant, known for Northern Italian cuisine and an in-house pasta room; a Five-Star, Five-Diamond spa with 22 treatment rooms; and the so-called Coliseum Pool, an oversized circular pool lined with over a million mosaic glass tiles that has become one of the resort’s most photographed features. For residents of the surrounding neighborhood, the resort functions almost as a private clubhouse and social hub, even though it operates as a separate commercial property under its own management.
That proximity is part of what distinguishes Pelican Hill from other ultra-luxury Orange County enclaves like Crystal Cove or Shady Canyon. Owning here means daily access to resort-caliber dining, spa treatments, and 36 holes of championship golf without ever leaving the neighborhood, while still living in a private, custom-built home rather than a resort villa. It’s a hybrid of resort convenience and residential permanence that has proven durably appealing to buyers who want a primary or secondary Southern California base with genuine amenity access built in.
Who Buys Here
Pelican Hill’s buyer pool tends to skew toward high-net-worth individuals purchasing second or third homes, along with a smaller number of full-time Orange County residents who have traded up from elsewhere in Newport Coast or Newport Beach. Golf is a significant draw — membership at Pelican Hill Golf Club is separate from home ownership and comes with its own initiation fees and dues, but proximity to the club is a major part of the neighborhood’s appeal for serious golfers. Privacy is another factor: the 24-hour guard-gated entry, combined with large lots and substantial setbacks between homes, gives residents a level of seclusion that’s increasingly hard to find in coastal Orange County as development density has increased elsewhere along the coast.
Because so few homes exist in the neighborhood and turnover is naturally low, most sales here happen quietly, often before a property is broadly marketed. Local agents frequently note that some of the community’s most significant transactions never appear as traditional public listings at all, moving instead through off-market or pre-market networks — a pattern common to ultra-prime micro-markets elsewhere in the country as well.
