This SoCal Surf Cottage Is Like Year-Round Summer Camp

Life-changing days often begin unassumingly. It was a typical Monday morning in 2015 that shook up the lives of Ross and Alexis Garrett. Ross, president of Surfline, was working from the couple’s home in Cardiff, California. Alexis, an interior designer (alexisgarrett.com), dropped her boys off at school, where she ran into a friend who had recently relocated to California from Australia. While her friend was recounting a weekend of house-hunting ventures, she revealed that a particular ramshackle 1920s Tudor made her think of Alexis. It was located just 10 minutes away in a surf town called Leucadia.

That was enough to prompt Alexis to ask for the address and punch it into her phone. “I’ve always loved old things,” she says, admitting she was immediately struck. “I got really crazy. I called my cousin Lanz, who’s an agent, and said, ‘find out everything you can about this house.’ ”

Over the course of the next few hours, Alexis found herself writing a letter to the sellers, asking her mother for a bridge loan, hiring a babysitter for Henry (now 10) and Conrad (now 7), and, with Ross and her cousin Lanz at her side, attending the final open house that was, coincidentally, scheduled for that afternoon.

“We get to the house and for whatever reason, Ross and Lanz are exploring the house by themselves and I’m exploring the house by myself,” says Alexis. “I walk into the house and I’m weepy. Four hours ago, this was not on my radar—what’s going on?”

When they met up in the dining room, Alexis composed herself enough to ask Ross his thoughts. “I was fully expecting him to say, ‘I’ve got to get home, I have a call in 10 minutes or what’s for dinner?’ ” Instead, he took her arm and said, “We have to do everything in our power to make this our home.”

Why the sudden leap? Ross and Alexis met nearby at the beach when they were in high school and started dating a few years after they finished college. Soon into the relationship, Ross decided to buy a simple 1950s tract home in Cardiff that, frankly, was a handful. “It was seriously disgusting, and I loved it so much,” says Alexis. Instead of movie and dinner dates, they worked on the house, grinding down old tile and sleeping in a tent in the backyard. “We did the whole thing ourselves.We painted it and everything,” she says. And when they married under the trees at Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve, they held the reception in their backyard. “We lived in that house for nine years. We had multiple additions and renovations. We loved it, we brought our two babies home to that house.”

But by 3 p.m. that Monday, Alexis, Ross, and Lanz were huddled inside their Prius, strategizing over their offer. They wrote the number down and then they waited.

After two sleepless nights, they received a call Wednesday morning: Their offer had been accepted with no contingencies, just a 30-day escrow. Later that day, Alexis called a real-estate agent friend and asked, “How quickly can you sell our house?” By the following Monday, they had a full-price offer with a 25-day escrow.

All the while, the state of their new 2,000-foot acquisition never made them flinch. “It wasn’t hard for me to see the potential, but we were given a two-inch binder from the inspector,” says Alexis. “I will never forget, as he handed over the binder, dust in his hair from the numerous crawl spaces, and sarcastically saying, ‘nice house.’ It was so gnarly,” she admits. “I must be risk-averse, because it didn’t scare me one bit.”

While the first phase of the house was dedicated to addressing safety issues, the next pressing issue was painting the house white, inside and out. Equally important was creating contrast, so they used a moody dark stain on the original pine wood planks.

Given there’s no insulation and the redwood walls are only about two inches thick, they need to layer on puffy jackets and UGG boots around the house in the morning. Fittingly, they dubbed their glorified tent “Camp Burgundy” and decided an adult summer-camp look—Pendleton blankets, vintage pennants, and hooks everywhere—would best capture the feel of the home.

The name also played into their poignant decision not to alter the house, despite hiring an architect to explore the possibilities. “Believe me, it was fun dreaming about the potential,” says Alexis. “But nothing felt quite right. Ross and I felt sick to our stomach about changing the scale or the charm of the home. We didn’t use any of the drawings and we started brainstorming. If I was able to build and design the home in the 1920s, what would it look like?”