The Corbetts' design broke nearly every convention of postwar American subdivision planning. In a standard development, houses face the street, garages dominate the front facade, and stormwater disappears into underground pipes. Village Homes reversed all of it. Houses are oriented around common areas at the rear of the buildings, creating shared spaces where neighbors actually encounter each other. Every street runs east to west, and every lot is positioned north to south. This was not aesthetic preference. It was solar engineering. The orientation allows homes with passive solar designs to capture the full arc of the sun's energy throughout the year, a practice that has since become standard in Davis and influenced energy-conscious development worldwide. Construction began in the 1970s and moved south to north through the 1980s, with the development completed in 1982.

Perhaps the most radical innovation at Village Homes is what happens when it rains. Instead of channeling stormwater into storm drains and piping it away, the development uses bioswales: shallow, grass-lined channels that collect rainwater and allow it to percolate slowly into the soil. The absorbed water irrigates the community's common areas, feeding the fruit and nut trees, the vegetable gardens, and the edible landscapes that residents share. No treated municipal water is needed for irrigation. The system is elegant in its simplicity. Rain falls, grass-lined channels catch it, the ground absorbs it, and the community's orchards and gardens drink. The bioswales double as green corridors that connect different parts of the neighborhood, creating a network of walkable, shaded paths that make the car an afterthought rather than a necessity.

Walk through Village Homes and you are walking through a food forest. Almond trees, walnut trees, apricot trees, plum trees, citrus trees, grape vines, and community vegetable plots grow throughout the common areas. Residents can harvest from these plantings for their own consumption. The idea was radical in the 1970s: that a neighborhood's landscaping could be productive rather than purely ornamental, that the water and land devoted to decorative lawns could instead grow food. The permaculture pioneer Bill Mollison featured Village Homes in his 1991 documentary series Global Gardener, recognizing it as an early, working example of urban permaculture. In 2015, permaculture educator Geoff Lawton produced a follow-up documentary calling it a food forest suburb. The community proved that edible landscaping could be beautiful, functional, and self-sustaining at the neighborhood scale.

Village Homes attracted international attention from its earliest days. French President Francois Mitterrand visited the development, drawn by its reputation as a model of environmentally friendly housing. Architects, urban planners, and sustainability researchers from around the world have studied the community as an early proof of concept for ideas that now have names like green infrastructure, low-impact development, and net-zero energy design. What makes Village Homes significant is not that it was a utopian experiment. It is that the experiment worked, and it kept working. Decades after completion, the community continues to function as designed. The bioswales still manage stormwater. The solar orientations still reduce energy costs. The fruit trees still produce. The common areas still draw neighbors outside. In an era when sustainable development often means expensive technology layered onto conventional design, Village Homes remains a reminder that the most durable solutions are sometimes the simplest ones.