Donald Bren talks of the faraway, ancient city of Ephesus as he looks out from the ninth floor of company headquarters to a portion of his own kingdom - the retail jewel Fashion Island. Easily, the eye carries beyond, to the Pacific Ocean and who knows what over the horizon. Perhaps to dream.

And, indeed, to act. Bren studies historic places in hopes of developing a vast piece of Orange County to challenge time itself.

He visits European cathedrals because they have permanence, built by the best architects and artisans of the day. He travels to places where master planning lasted centuries. And he has been shaping for some time now his own signature landscape - the Irvine Ranch, the property he influences as chairman of The Irvine Co. he owns. The man making history spends time studying it.

He finds inspiration in Northern Italy, at the Alhambra in Spain, and ancient Ephesus in Turkey - once home to 250,000 people, the seat of the Roman empire in Asia, home to Alexander the Great for a time.

Bren visited Ephesus to "stand in the center of the main street, the city center point, and look in all four quadrants of the compass and see white marble roads and marble walls and columns and portions of temples…To stand there and see that was so inspirational to me; this wonderful, classical architecture and city planning…I tried to translate some of that architecture and planning and bring it forward."

While the world's great cities mark time in centuries, Bren has been doing hurry-up work here.