Why does it cost some $3 million to fix up one Crystal Cove cottage?

Crystal Cove cottage #11, shown in Newport Beach on Tuesday, October 16, 2018, is one of the north beach cottages that will be part of the second phase of restoration. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Yes, that funky vibe at Crystal Cove State Park is, indeed, priceless.

But when a price tag is actually attached — say, $55 million to renovate 17 eclectic little cottages, averaging more than $3 million apiece — it can be a shock to the system.

Why the heck does it cost so much?! I mean, the Irvine Company probably spent less to build some of those McMansions in nearby Newport Coast!

When we posed this question to the folks at the Crystal Cove Conservancy, the nonprofit running the show with California State Parks, they were eager to answer.

A purple-gray marine layer rolled in as Kate Wheeler, president and CEO of the Conservancy, and Austin Barrow, chief operating officer, led us down the ocean-front boardwalk toward the forbidden zone behind a construction fence. Part of the answer was right beneath their feet.

This boardwalk got snagged at the California Coastal Commission, which feared it would behave too much like a seawall, allowing sand to be sucked away. It had to be re-engineered and redesigned to minimize erosion — an approval process that took some seven years. (Wheeler saw the wisdom of this last winter, when heavy rains and king tides created a sinkhole in front of the historic seawall at Cottage No. 13, while the boardwalk area was fine.)

Look up for more answers. The misty marine layer wafts up the bluffs and over towering retaining walls that protect these little slices of history from slides. This infrastructure was a huge part of the project’s cost: nearly $20 million.

Kate Wheeler, CEO, left, and Austin Barrow, COO, right, of the Crystal Cove Conservancy, walk along the new boardwalk during a tour of the beach-front cottages at Crystal Cove State Park in Newport Beach, on Wednesday, December 6, 2023. (Photo by Mark Rightmire, Orange County Register/SCNG)

The construction fence swung open and we stepped through. The next clue comes from the stunningly dangerous, decrepit, condemnable condition of the cottages themselves. No plans, no architects, no engineers — these were camps and lean-tos and shacks cobbled together from found objects by weekend warriors, which fell into an advanced state of decay. Many were slathered in lead paint. Drafty, cold, bad electrical, worse plumbing. Many didn’t have foundations and were squatting right on sand. One sat on five telephone poles hammered into the ground — and not terribly far into the ground.

“We lift them 15 feet in the air, build a foundation and lower them back down,” Barrow said. Some can’t be lifted quite high enough, which creates an entirely new set of engineering challenges that must be solved.

Crystal Cove, on the National Register of Historic Places, is a prime example of “vernacular architecture” — a type of local construction that uses traditional materials and/or whatever’s available locally. It’s intimately related to, and strongly influenced by, its specific context, Arch Daily explains. The phenom was common in Southern California before the age of building codes, but it wasn’t built to last, and is mostly gone now.

Except for here. To save these cottages, they’re stripped down to studs. Every board, every brick, every rock in every cottage at Crystal Cove must be cataloged, cleaned and, if possible, saved and restored. If that’s impossible thanks to, say, dry rot or mold, a nationwide treasure hunt of “like-for-like” commences. Fixing or replacing windows, doors, countertops, tiles — many hand-made by folks whose first talent may not have been glazing or masonry — involves artisans recreating tile and linoleum patterns that no longer exist. They work from historic photos to remain true. The price tag for this slice of cottage restoration work is about $35 million.

A visitor stops to take a photo while walking along the new boardwalk that runs the length of the beach in front of the newly renovated cottages at Crystal Cove State Park in Newport Beach on Wednesday, December 6, 2023. (Photo by Mark Rightmire, Orange County Register/SCNG)

The work is being done by Spectra Company, which calls itself a leader in historic preservation, restoration and rehabilitation in the western United States. Because of the historic expertise the Crystal Cove project required, Spectra was the only qualified bidder who could “bond the job” — that is, protect the Conservancy and State Parks against a lack of performance, company default or warranty issues.

So: Not cheap.

“The question is: Is it worth it?” Wheeler asked, standing on the porch of Cottage No. 9, whose overhang would have once clocked her 6-foot-plus tall chief operating officer square in the forehead. The whole thing had to be raised.

“We could have knocked it down and rebuilt it all a lot more cheaply,” she said. “But that’s not the work that the State Parks does.”

Quirky paradise

Crystal Cove was quirky California paradise at perhaps its most magical.

Once part of the vast holdings of The Irvine Company, camp spaces rented for some $25 a month back in the 1930s when the first structures sprang up. Outsiders didn’t know Crystal Cove was there, said erstwhile resident John Adamson — there were no signs, no shuttles, no Pacific Coast Highway-adjacent parking lots. There wasn’t much in the way of creature comforts, either, but the majesty of roaring waves, Pacific sunsets and a front yard of white sand and blue water made that completely irrelevant.

Visitors walk along the new boardwalk that runs the length of the beach in front of the newly renovated cottages at Crystal Cove State Park in Newport Beach on Wednesday, December 6, 2023. (Photo by Mark Rightmire, Orange County Register/SCNG)

The leases were month-to-month back then. The understanding it could end at any moment was like bittersweet chocolate baked into its very existence. But those leases kept going, passed from generation to generation to generation, and a singular community formed. Meals were cooked and shared in the communal kitchen. Sunset martinis celebrated each sunset by the mast. There was an annual costume and charades party in Cottage No. 26, which forbade store-bought costumes and mandated that everything come from cottage or cove.

“These scavenged costumes expressed the creative results of vernacular design,” a history of Cottage No. 26 says. “One year someone came dressed as a ‘Crystal Cove Shower,’ complete with shower curtain, towel and unrinsed shampoo, to represent being caught in the shower after the water pressure dropped, before the person was able to rinse their hair (a frequent event at Crystal Cove back then).”

When the entire property passed into the State Park system in 1979, residents recognized that their little paradise really would not, could not, last forever. In the ’80s and ’90s, they joined a united, rebellious front to vanquish visions of a luxury resort at the site. Led by resident and Conservancy founder Laura Davick, they succeeded, and what we see today was born.

Former resident Adamson lived with his wife and son in Cabin No. 7. Her family had it since 1939. It was so cold in the winter, he recalled, that many residents left until the summer sun returned. But not his family. They were there year-round, and first thing they’d do on winter mornings was open the oven door and fire up the wood-burning stove — if they had scrounged up enough driftwood from the beach. “That used to heat up No. 7 really well,” Adamson said.

Kate Wheeler, CEO of the Crystal Cove Conservancy, talks about the years-long project of restoring the beach-front cottages at Crystal Cove State Park in Newport Beach, on Wednesday, December 6, 2023. (Photo by Mark Rightmire, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Adamson and his wife had a son, Tristen. They tracked his growth on the bedroom door, measuring him every year on his birthday. When residents finally had to vacate in 2001, the Adamsons couldn’t bear to leave the door behind, so they took it off its hinges and carted it with them to their next home. “It lay in our basement for 20-odd years,” Adamson said. “When they started renovating No. 7, I went to the project manager and I said, ‘Would you like the bedroom door back?’ “

Observant visitors to Cottage No. 7, “The Little Grass Shack,” will see Tristen’s growth chart on the bedroom door where it always was. Before the cottage opened to the public, Adamson and his wife got to sleep in it once again. A grown Tristen, now just shy of 6 feet tall, joined them. They made one last growth mark on the door.

Adamson returned to Crystal Cove to work part-time in guest services in 2018. The changes astound him. “I’ve got to take my hat off to Spectra. They’ve done a fantastic job. It wasn’t easy — a lot of them had to be taken down to the studs,” he said. “They had to put in sewage, utilities — if we’re going to rent them out to people, they have to be up to code. It’s a very sensitive job.”

And it’s an important one. “The historians will tell you Crystal Cove is the last example of vernacular architecture in California,” he said. “There were dozens of these back in the ’20s, but they’re gone. It’s like a little time capsule of the history of Southern California.”

Kevin Pearsall, State Parks superintendent for the Orange Coast, agrees. “The historical obligations are massive,” he said of the project. “That’s the concept of that park.”

The nonprofit Conservancy is the state’s partner and right arm here. The Conservancy’s for-profit management group operates the concessions — including the gorgeous Beachcomber restaurant, right on the sand, and the ever-popular Shake Shack, up on the bluff. Income from these venerable institutions passes from the Conservancy to State Parks, which reinvests it in park maintenance and operations. All that helps keep rooms in ocean-front cabins at laughably low rates, and funds education and research programs for kids in low-income schools. A dormitory to house those kids for overnight STEM programs is in process at Crystal Cove.

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This public-private partnership is held up as a shining example of how these things can and should work. “It has been a very successful relationship, one of the best,” Pearsall said. “The state is very happy with the relationship.”

Wheeler is as well. She stood before Cottage No. 12, North Beach Tower. It used to sag forward toward the water, as if it longed to break free and take a swim. The joke was that the dog who lived there could play a game of fetch, all by himself, all day long, by simply taking the ball to the high side of the room and chasing it as it rolled down to the low side.

After painstaking renovation, Wheeler noted with just a hint of melancholy, it sags no longer.

So, folks, that’s why it costs some $3 million to ready a nearly-century-old cottage for what’s essentially public “glamping” on one of California’s most gorgeous and unique beaches. Snagging a room or cabin at Crystal Cove is notoriously difficult, because everyone wants one: Wheeler’s advice is to set up an account with Reserve California and commit to checking religiously from 7:55 to 8:20 a.m. daily for a couple of weeks. You should eventually snag one, she said.

A fun game to play once you do: Find the new stuff. Fresh infrastructure bringing the cottages up to code — sprinkler systems, structural braces, electrical upgrades and the like — are left unpainted. Me, I’m angling for Cabin No. 7.

Source: Orange County Register

Why does it cost some $3 million to fix up one Crystal Cove cottage?

Quirky paradise

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Why does it cost some $3 million to fix up one Crystal Cove cottage?

Quirky paradise

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