2-1130 East Cliff Drive

Call Celeste for your private showing: 831-239-4646!

Only the sands of time can tell the tale of this majestic, historic 1904 craftsman home perched above Twin Lakes, steps from the beach, the Pacific Ocean, and the Santa Cruz Yacht Harbor centered in the heart of Live Oak.   

This beauty is filled with ageless, tightly fitted tongue-and-groove Douglas fir doorways, ancient redwood planking, vintage fixtures, and the pièce de résistance: panoramic ocean views from the iconic cupola, which has inspired countless individuals since its inception. The walls say, "It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness." Climb the stairs to see for yourself.  

Long before our modern era, this home flaunts a distinguished history of residents who made their mark in local, regional, and national culture and arts.   

First, it was the home of Frazier Lewis, who bought the house in 1917. It was one of the earliest craftsman-style homes and is now his namesake.  Frazier famously crafted candy on site and invented the Victoria Cream which has become one of the great mysteries of the culinary world, as the original recipe was lost and nobody is quite sure what the super-secret ingredient was that made them so good. Maybe it was the rum? 

Living with Frazier in the house was his mother, Patty Reed Lewis, the last living member of the ill-fated Donner Party. She survived the treacherous journey as an 8-year old, and is pictured by the front stairs. Her rocking chair still resides in the attic which was James D. Houston's office, where he wrote “Snow Mountain Passage”, his historical fiction novel depicting the dramatic pioneer story.  

James D. Houston and Jeanne Wakatski Houston moved into the home in 1963 and raised three children. The family thrived in the neighborhood, bringing Hawaiiana with them from their marriage in 1957 in front of Diamond Head on Waikiki Beach. They settled just steps from 12th Ave beach, more petite, but equally magnificent with the beach bookended by Black Point and the Harbor.    

If this private alley compound could talk, it would prefer to write a novel—perhaps even several on various topics. It might include an anthology or a collection of poems, or maybe Jeanne and James Houston's' cowritten non-fiction memoir "Farewell to Manzanar." In its 50th year of publication, this is the story of the harsh realities that 7-year-old Jeanne and her family experienced during WWII when they were forced to relocate from their home in Ocean park, CA to a Japanese internment camp. But it is also juxtaposed with the joyful memories of later cheerleading at her high school in Long Beach, CA. After Jeanne’s passing, her family found her secretly beloved cheerleading uniform and has kept it in her bedroom as a tribute. For decades, the home was filled with writers, artists, potters, poets, musicians, and creatives alike.  

This grand beauty is ready for its next chapter, flaunting great bones, a historic designation, legal duplex status, classic Craftsman wrap-around porches, and endless possibilities. The upstairs is full of vintage built-ins, long-lived fixtures, fathomless books, and ornate carvings still holding the memories of family, friends, celebrations, and laughter, while the first-floor rooms are skillfully arranged, like origami, ready to transform into a swan, a lotus flower, or a real-life crane, floating in the ocean and lake waters seen from the multitude of windows on every level.  

While the salty air and ocean elements can be harsh on the peeling paint so near to the sea, don't worry—this Majesty’s story is not over; it is just a new beginning.  

Are you ready to write your future?  

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James Houston Works 

Surfing: The Sport of Hawaiian Kings, w/ Ben R. Finney (1966)

Between Battles (1968)

Gig (1969)

A Native Son of the Golden West, Ballantine Books (1972)

Farewell to Manzanar, with Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston (1972)

An Occurrence At Norman's Burger Castle (1972)

The Adventures of Charlie Bates (1973)

Open Field, W/ John Brodie (1974)

Three Songs for My Father (1974)

Continental Drift (1978)

California Heartland: Writing from the Great Central Valley, with Gerald W. Haslam (1978)

West Coast Fiction: Modern Writing from California, Oregon, and Washington, editor (1979)

Gasoline: The automotive adventures of Charlie Bates (1980)

Californians: Searching for the Golden State (1982)

One Can Think About Life After the Fish Is in the Canoe: And Other Coastal Sketches/Beyond Manzanar: Views of Asian-American Womanhood, with Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston (1985)

Love Life (1985)

The Men in My Life: And Other More or Less True Recollections of Kinship (1987)

In the Ring of Fire: A Pacific Basin Journey (1997)

The Last Paradise (Literature of the American West) (1998)

Snow Mountain Passage (2001)

The Literature of California, Volume 1: Native American Beginnings to 1945, editor (2001)

Hawaiian Son, with Eddie Kamae (2004)

Bird of Another Heaven (2007)

Where Light takes its Color From the Sea (2008)

A Queen's Journey: An Unfinished Novel (2011)

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston Works:

Farewell To Manzanar, w/ James Houston (1972)

Don't Cry It's Only Thunder, w/ Paul G. Hensler (1984)

The Legend of Fire Horse Woman (2004)

"Where Light Takes Its Color from the Sea" Chapter 1. The View from Santa Cruz From here I can see the candy store shaped like a Dutch windmill. Atop its red, peaked roof sits on an eight-sided dome painted white, with windows too small, too toy-like and too curiously placed for anyone to look through. I used to imagine someone lurked in that stubby tower watching me. But that’s impossible. It’s a make-believe windmill, with make-believe windows. Last year in a storm its vanes blew down. Few people think of it as a windmill anymore. It’s just a candy store, with a Dutch girl on its side, and she is fading fast. All day she faces the sun. I doubt that many who pass realize she is supposed to be Dutch. The store is called Buckhart’s, which might be a Dutch name, except that the long sign over its door features not a girl but an enormous heart, and gazing from within the heart is a well-antlered buck who looks pirated from some Yorkshire hunting lodge. The heart was red once. After the vanes blew down they painted it white. The buck is white. The girl is white. The eight-sided dome is white. Where the morning sun catches it, and the dome gleams and leaves an angular flash on my retina when I look away. It’s a landmark, the candy store. If I want to tell someone how to find my house, I mention Buckhart’s. Everyone knows where it is. “I live across the street from Buckhart’s,” I say. A strange identity. A famous road passes between Buckhart’s and me, an old road that curves along the coast and carries thousands of cars a day, tourist cars, visitors’ cars, beach-bound and water-seeking cars. This is a seacoast town, spread along the edge of Monterey Bay. It’s winter now, the end of February, a leap year day in fact, the twenty-ninth, the rarest day. It’s winter, and the stream of cars along this famous road is thicker now than it ever was in the summers when I first discovered the town, fourteen years ago. And what about this year’s summer? Who dares predict what that will bring? It isn’t a wide road, two lanes laid perhaps thirty years ago. In this state, that is a long time for anything to last. It is already 1964, and this is Santa Cruz, resort town for that great megalopolis rapidly surrounding San Francisco Bay. A range of mountains separates us from the megalopolis, and so far we only feel the explosive overflow on weekends. It’s just a matter of time, of course. Everything in California is just a matter of time. But so far this town has been spared. That’s one reason I came here, to taste it again. This is why I watch Buckhart’s from my window. Who knows how old it is? Forty, maybe fifty years? This house I watch from is even older. Sixty, the owner tells me. Older than Buckhart’s and higher by a cupola. If I sit up here in this cupola and watch the dome of Buckhart’s hard enough, I don’t see the traffic. For long moments it isn’t there. I burn my eyes on his gleaming dome, then the stream dies. Buckhart, it is said, lived here once himself, roamed these redwood rooms, kept the little garden, and each morning crossed that small acre of apple trees to his store. He didn’t live here long. No one has lived here long, not in the twenty years this house has been rented, not since the original candy man died and took his secret formula with him, and the deed to the land changed hands. In the old days it was an estate, with the aura about it of a southern novel. The old Frazier-Lewis place, everybody called it. The lawn spread two hundred yards down to the sea. The grounds covered what has become several square blocks of bungalows. The lake that is now a state game preserve came with the land, a private vista from the wide front porch. In those days the candy man would go next door to his candy factory, lock himself in a small upstairs room, and mix his formula for the chocolate confection that made him famous. But the candyman died sometime before the Second World War. His sister died without issue. The family died, and this immense house was gradually surrounded. The grandeur that depended so much on distance and perspective was lost. It became a rental property. They closed his little factory. Now its weathered wooden frame bulges next door with a hundred years of dusty, warping furniture. The candy he made there made him a fortune, and I suspect that is why Buckhart lived here while. He was searching for the formula that died with Frazier-Lewis. Imagine Buckhart scouring this creaking house for any scrap of yellowed paper. Sometimes late at night the wind rises from the sea in a sudden thrust that shivers the ceiling. Nails draw, floorboards settle. It is almost certain that Buckhart is up in the attic again, creeping and tapping the walls for hollow spots that might hold the long-lost recipe for the chocolate marvel that only Frazier-Lewis could concoct. Buckhart’s hunch was reasonable, if he ever thought to search, this is a house of gothic secrets, of hidden nooks and dark stairways, sudden rooms and unpried window seats, a house to explore on a rainy afternoon. When it was built, two years after San Francisco’s earthquake and fire, it was elegant, a Victorian climax. Everyone must have built such houses that season. This town is dotted with them. From here I can see their spires, turrets and domes,gables, newel posts, and dormer windows. I can’t help thinking, though, that this is, first of all, a boy’s dream house. Tom Sawyer deserved it. Penrod Schofield should have planned adventures here. It is a house for Jack Armstrong to surround, for the Katzenjammer Kids to invade, for Huckleberry Finn to find floating down the Mississippi. I have always coveted old houses, with a boy’s fascination for the ancient and curious, similar to the way I once collected coins, and later old cars. Not vintage cars. Just old ones. I have sought old houses as one seeks an old man whose tales verify what sometimes seems never to have existed. Call it a yearning for continuity. In California I have watched mountains change their contour, seen orchards swallowed by bulldozers, known whole towns to sprout in a summer, watched familiar roads inflate like inner tubes of thrice their size, and felt square miles of asphalt raise a valley’s temperature until seasons lose their shape. Such transformations are, of course, the experience of the Western World, in one form or another, for the past couple of hundred years. And it is nothing new to seek permanencies in a shifting environment. But in California things change faster than in most other places. And I happened to fasten on old houses, like hoary boulders in the inexorable flood. We first saw this one from several blocks away, actually saw its cupola first, which rises higher than any building in sight. It rests atop a black roof so sloped it’s almost a house-long steeple. The cupola is square, with a pointed roof of its own, and windows on all sides. The top panes are stained maroon. The house overlooks a lake surrounded by eucalyptus trees. But between the house and lake runs that road with its stream of Jaguars and Impalas and Thunderbirds. So one enters from the rear, up a narrow alleyway. From the ground it is a fortress of flaking gray-green. Along one side a wide staircase rises to the second-floor porch. Around the porch is the original front door. When we first approached, the house had been two years empty. The foot of the entry stairway was lush with high grass, untrimmed rose bushes, and a choir of wild, white-mouthes lilies. Most of the banisters’ latticed siding had fallen away, so they sagged and leaned. At the head of the stairs, beneath the porch’s vast overhang, a ragged wicker rocker nodded in the breeze that blew up from the beach across the lake. Peering through the heavy windows and through the dust that lay like gauze over everything, we saw paneled walls of heart redwood, twelve-foot ceilings, cherrywood sideboards, and walnut chests, dark Boston rockers, chandeliers of brass, with yellow bulbs as big as streetlights. No one had lived upstairs for two years. No one had lived downstairs for twenty. The lower floor was a warehouse for the relics of two families—the family of the candy man whose forebears had survived the Donner Party disaster of 1846, and the present owner’s family, who arrived in this region soon after the Civil War and acquired the house when the candy man passed away. In that downstairs repository we found a delicately carved chest of shelves holding hundreds of bird eggs, a room full of elderly sewing machines, another room filled with carved bedsteads, a four-foot engraving of Queen Victoria that had never been uncrated, a moth-eaten Union Army sergeant's jacket, a certificate of merit for that sergeant signed by Abraham Lincoln, a first edition of the first proceedings of the California Legislature (1850), turn-of-the-century sepia-tones of the descendants of the Donner Party Survivors, framed photos of long-gone redwood giants, back issue of the San Francisco Chronicle announcing the First World War through a split in the linoleum, other issues landing Calvin Coolidge, Ramon Navarro, Rin Tin Tin. Blending with the dust and the fumes, a spirit hung in the air above those old clothes and furnishings and documents.I knew it had drifted up to permeate the whole building. At sixty years of age, this house with its storerooms of neglected history reached that far again into the nation's past. Twice sixty years still isn't long, by Eastern or European standards, but in California it is about as far back as a non-Hispanic Caucasian can expect to reach. Unless of course you count the walls themselves, the ceilings and the door frames cut from nearby forests that grew a thousand years before the Spanish came, walls whose very touch can send one's nerve-ends probing fern layers of primeval loam. And so we rented it, at a bargain, agreeing to help the owners restore its livability, having found, it seemed, a great deal more than a roof over our heads. Even with this wealth of continuity, however, it must be pointed out that such a house located somewhere else, say farther inland, in the Sacramento Valley or in the Mother Lode, would have held far less fascina-tion. What appealed so is that it overlooks this stretch of coast-line. It belongs to this particular beach, this curve of bay, to a fall of northern light I have spent fourteen years running to. A lot depends on the light here. It shapes the mountains and draws a mossy green from those high meadow patches that never turn brown. Down along the river that runs through town, the light swells up under a cloud of seagulls as they rise in a swirl, between the concrete bridges. They turn, soar, dive like a shower of white sparks and descend again to their marshy, low-tide, inland island. In later afternoon the light turns the bay white. It catches eucalyptus leaves with their undersides up, like a thousand new moons. The sea, as much as the light, gives this curve of coast its flavor. The light takes its color from the sea, sometimes seems to be emerging from it. And the sea here is ever-present. On clear days it coats the air with a transparent tinge of palest blue that salts and sharpens every detail.T It's not a placid sea. This is a bend of the Pacific. Swells roll in from storm centers north and south of the equator and steadily wear away the cliffs that edge these towns. Every winter, somewhere, a wall of sandstone finally lets go and slides out from under the topsoil to be dissolved and strewn along the beaches. A few years back a block-long section of a scenic cliff-drive highway fell into the surf that had torn out its underpinnings. So far the sea's intrusion has produced more beauty than havoc. This is the northern curve of Monterey Bay. A wooded arm of the Coast Range curves with it, embracing these lowlands. The Pacific is softened here. The worst winds are softened. The slow process of erosion has left many-colored cliffs— yellow, buff, brown, and ochre. Each striated layer reveals the pressed sand of beaches eons old. Sometimes in the low sun of an autumn afternoon they turn orange and glow like the horizon itself. Miles of these cliffs are notched with sandy coves, whose eroded walls give the beaches a wildness, a remoteness. The coves are hot and protected, yet far enough below the cliff edges that one can forget a town lies just above. Tree roots hang through the walls. Tenacious cedars and eucalyptus, like sprung umbrellas, frame the sky.Sometimes slick brown seals glide past offshore. Pelicans swoop, searching for fish. Low tides bare pocked reefs and mossy primordial worlds of anemones and chitons and hermit crabs. From any of these coves, on most days, Monterey Peninsula, twenty miles south across the bay, seems to rise from the sea like a long-lost, velvet island. From the water's edge one can look west toward the main part of town. There, the sand that draws its half-moon around the bay lays a final broad hot stripe along the Board walk, below the high-looped rollercoaster, past a long row of arches that leads to a turn-of-the-century pleasure palace called the Casino, red-domed, and of a style with the spires and turrets that cap the knolls behind it. Farther along the main beach, bearded pilings grow from the sand, anchoring a crusty pier that probes the bay for half a mile. The long beach ends at last, beyond the pier, as a final row of cliffs bend northward. From here, two miles away and seen from the east, those cliffs are a straight line reaching out from town, a brown palisade fending off the open sea. An islet sits just beyond the palisade, thick with seals who bark and sun themselves.Atop the cliff there is a jagged stand of eucalyptus trees that never move. They have not moved in fourteen years. At sunset they are tall and black against a flaming sky. Then the seal rock is the town's last outpost. The water across the bay turns silver white, with only the long dark pier to cut the whiteness. I call myself a Californian. I am fascinated by everything about this state. But when it becomes an image in my mind, it is most often this town, this coast, this view. During three years in Europe not long ago (when we lived, by the way, in a four-hundred-year-old Tudor cottage), I spent two and a half of those years glad to be free of America. I actually toyed with the idea of never coming back. When I finally began to long again for the homeland, I saw nothing but a mile of orange cliffs, a slate-blue bay catching sea winds, a crusty pier. This curve of the coast has been among the few constants in my life, and that is curious, in a way, because this coast is not, strictly speaking home. I was born in San Francisco, started high school there. I came over the mountains in Santa Clara Valley. The town of Santa Cruz (Holy Cross) was first a mission colony founded by Franciscans soon after the American Revolution. The mission’s adobe walls have long since eroded away. Now a whitewashed and timbered replica stands on the site. Later is was a port town, and lumber town, surrounded by superb farm and ranching country. Part of it is still a fishing town. Every day a stubby fleet chugs out before dawn in search of salmon, snapper, albacore. But for as long as I have known it, this has been a beach town, first of all, a resort town and a retirement haven, with a trailer courts on the outskirts, Victorian manors at the core, and interlaced with rows of summer bungalows. Around and beyond Buckhart’s bleached windmill I can see them—cottages and bungalows with brick-red roofs, shingle-gray roofs, checkered roofs, shake and composition roofs, a field of roofs broken with clumps of pine and cedar lines of eucalyptus that crisscross the town. From here, a block back from the beach, I can see quaint streets whose houses are trellised and filigreed, slightly weathered from winter gales and salt air, painted pink or white or forest green, bedecked with driftwood or with an occasional pink plaster flamingo on the lawn, and labeled with plaques of redwood lettering: Port-o-Call, Vista del Mar, Pair-o-Dice, The Darlingtons-Mary and Frank, This is IT, Bide-a-Wee, My Blue Haven. I first saw these houses and the beach and the pier and the lines of eucalyptus during my initial escape to Santa Cruz, at age sixteen, a high school junior in San Jose. It was Easter vacation and "everybody" was renting motel rooms for the week, as they still do here, to drink beer and misbehave and hopefully get arrested. I kept returning because I liked to swim and lie in the sun and play volleyball and ride the waves, and it was easy enough to get here, thirty miles in less than an hour through wooded mountains, over good roads. One year the summer came and went and I kept coming, spending long hours alone hiking empty beaches in the fall and through the winter. I had found an unexpected fulfillment by this wide bay. The light, the sand, the glinting sea seemed to explain almost everything well enough. In California the beach, like wine tasting, can become a way of life. My time invested served as a kind of initiation fee, admitting me to a loose fraternity of beachrats, surfers, and self-appointed exiles who found some common bond in the asocial and irresponsible womb-warmth along the coast. This was an important first, an identity not pressed upon me by family, church, or school. There followed then a series of memorable firsts that linked me to this region. I first got unmanageably drunk here, on several quarts of Lucky Lager, and vomited into that marvelous sand. I pursued my first serious love affair here, in a sleeping bag, in and out of all those wild and lovely coves. I learned what my Scoutmaster had tried in vain to teach me, how to start a fire with one match. Maybe it was the salt in the driftwood, or the extra dryness of newsprint that has baked all day in the sun. Finally, I experi-enced, in the presence of this sky and this reach of windworn cliff, that short-lived but overwhelming sense of unity with nature that at once dissolves and expands and defines the human soul. Until recently I never stayed here more than a week at a time, rarely more than two or three days. Yet whenever I made that trip through the mountains I knew what to expect. Like old houses, this town with its turrets and cupolas and bungalows and fleet of fishing boats has been a refuge from change itself. And like old houses, the town is ever more archaic and out of step with the times. For many, it is becoming something of a nuisance in America's fastest growing state. And so its face, its style must soon be altered. Every weekend now the megalopolis gets closer. Between the mountains and the sea, fields vibrate, waiting for the bulldozers. Foresighted realtors have already mapped out the program of growth. Some envision a white city, agleam and curving right around the bay to connect this northern edge with Monterey. In their vision, beehive hotels will line the beaches, like Acapulco and Miami. Evenings now I watch my favorite view, one I have come to love more than any in the world— that long arm, the pali-sade, capped with upright eucalyptus, the dark pier probing a silver bay—and think of the man who has promised to build a convention center there, at the edge of the farthest cliff, overlooking seal rock. He wants to tear down the trees and install a hotel in the shape of a pyramid and, next to it, an auditorium in the shape of a perfect sphere, where Lions and Oddfellows can assemble every year. Part of me takes it for granted that this will happen because I have grown up in a state where such things happen every day. As a Californian I have learned that fourteen years is a fairly long moment to enjoy one view. Perhaps I am luckier than I care to admit. Who am I, after all? At best, a fourteen-year man in a fourteen-decade town, a thirty-year man in a two-century state. Have I any claim on a view? It is only a lucky chance that my father decided to leave Texas when he did, to settle in San Francisco before I came along.If he had not moved out in the early thirties, among the thousands in search of better jobs and better weather, I would not have been born a Native Son of the Golden West, might never have seen these cliffs and beaches. Can I begrudge the multitudes who continue to arrive, for the same reasons? Can I even begrudge the weekend quests which so clog the roads to this seaside town, little pilgrimages I myself so often made? Who do you challenge? Where do you draw the line? Well, there is another part of me that knows you have to challenge the pyramid. That goes without saying. And you have to fight the perfect sphere. Schemes like that just have to be resisted, though you may not be able to resist the flood itself. Each time I look out and find my view still there, intact, I feel twice-blessed, reprieved. From here, from this decaying boys dream of a manor house I can watch it, or walk to the beach for a swim or a hike over low-tide reefs. I watch gulls soar, the seals sunning, slender leaves that turn in the wind, along the curve of coast that is the country I know and which I realize now I have always expected California to be. The knowledge that it is all a matter of time doesn't diminish the pleasure of living here. If anything, I suppose this sharpens it, like the tang of apples stolen from the yard of the mean old man. Sometimes I ask myself, If those pyramids ever began to rise, where would you go? I don't know. It is a strange identity, to live across the street from Buck-hart's bleached and vaneless windmill, to be rooted in the land of the rootless, committed to a country that seems committed to unbridled change, all the while clutching at Walt Whitman and Johnny Appleseed and Huckleberry as they grab for handholds on the last lip of the western precipice. One has little choice in such matters, of course. I have no place else to be from but here. (1964) Where Light takes its color from the Sea, James D. Houston

Call Celeste 831-239-4646 or celeste@faraola.com, schoonerrealty.com