Close to the dolphin-rich waters of Newport Beach lies Crystal Cove State Park, a charming stretch of beach on the Southern California coast with a lot to offer day visitors—and a few lucky overnighters.
The state is in the middle of renovating a collection of vintage seaside cottages, and the reservation system to spend the night in a completed one is a competitive, cross-your-fingers effort where rooms book up six months in advance. (I was literally sworn to secrecy by someone who insisted they knew of a hack to increase your chances on the state’s reservation software!)
So why exactly is there so much demand to spend the night at one of these cottages? They’re all that remains of the vibrant surf communities you could once find all up and down the coast of California, and there’s only 46 of them. The homes sit right on the beach, and are very simple structures that appeal to nostalgia for a less complicated era. This place appeals as prime beach access in an area where typically only yacht owners and patrons of swanky hotels can sleep right at the water’s edge.
While I haven’t been lucky enough to score an overnight stay, I did take a free guided walking tour (open to the public on a monthly basis) to explore the cottages.
Inside, small bedrooms only encompass a bed and a nightstand (all decorated with books rather than devices) and the windows open without screens to the sea breeze. Braided rugs and wood paneling are everywhere, and all the decor is curated to look like the 1920s and ’30s. The state historian on the project has sourced replacement furnishings from donations and restored original light fixtures. You’ll find handmade cribbage boards, duck decoy lamps and wrought iron thumb latches instead of doorknobs. In Cottage 27, the kitchen cupboards are made from shipwreck lumber.
Restorers picked wall colors for cottage interiors based on peeling paint back to the first two layers. Inside one home, a woman on my walking tour of the historic district plunked down on the bed and said with veritable longing, “I just want to stay here.” That’s the pull of these cottages; they draw us in with their plainness. You won’t find a TV or wireless signal here… you’re meant to cook, play cards, chat and enjoy the surf.
The cottages are so charming and vintage that it can be moving. The linoleum in one cottage’s kitchen made me blurt out, “That was our kitchen floor growing up in Vermont!” and the tour guide fist-bumped me. It’s Armstrong Flooring’s pattern #5352, made in 1932 and revived in the 1970s, and informally called the Christmas pattern because its sales helped the company give its employees Christmas bonuses even amid the Great Depression.
Our tour guide said that today that pattern goes for $15,000 per 600 square feet, sold by a company in Wisconsin—thankfully, the restorer for Crystal Cove found a roll in L.A. and jumped in the truck to grab the same square footage for merely $1,500. It was amazing to see this beautiful floor pattern in place again (my parents sold that house many decades ago).
Crystal Cove’s story begins with the Gabrielino (Tongva) and Juaneno (Acjachemen) peoples. Starting in the early 1900s, settlers began visiting the area, and in 1926, it was named Crystal Cove. Silent films were shot here (the beach served as a stand-in for Tahiti or Hawai’i with palm trees and cottages roofed with palm thatch), and people started building rustic cabins and cottages for weekend and summer use.
Today, the site’s one of the last “intact, self-contained 20th-century coastal recreational communities,” according to the state park website. Visitors who lived here as children are often brought to tears: Our tour guide recounted that one woman said, “When I was a little girl, I stayed here and it’s exactly the same.” Another man had yelled at our guide for undertaking work on the cottage (#6) that his family had once owned, wanting it to remain untouched, but when he walked through after its restoration, he cried in happy overwhelm. “Is it worth it now?” the guide had teased him. (Another tearjerker? The Bette Midler movie Beaches was filmed here.)
So what happened to turn a small community into a state park? The Irvine Family which owned the land (and had previously permitted friends and employees to build their seasonal structures) decided in the late 1930s that people needed to either move their cottages elsewhere or give up ownership and lease their homes from the Irvine Company. Those who chose to lease had a mandate that no dimensional changes could be made, which has preserved the cottages to the quaint standards and square footage of yesteryear. In 1979, the state purchased the land to form the state park and the 12-acre area was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. The last person moved out July 7, 2001. Dozens of similar beach communities once existed all along the California coast, but Crystal Cove is the only one that has survived.
Plans are underway for an educational program starting next year that will permit students to stay at Crystal Cove overnight to monitor beach erosion and sea level rise. They’ll stay in dorm-style bunk beds for a 24-hour period, organized through the UC Irvine School of Engineering.
From Crystal Cove’s beach, you can seasonally see whales of different species. At happy hour, the on-site Beachcomber cafe still raises, as it has since the 1950s, a flag showing a martini glass. I can’t go further without mentioning (and showing you a photo of) the impressive “Big Bad Bloody Mary” with a crab claw garnish served at this cool spot.
Nearby is a 1,100-acre off-shore underwater state park where scuba divers can see sharks, eels, lobster, kelp forests and reefs—plus two sunken admiralty anchors and a World War II–era bomber that went down on a test flight.
So about those sought-after overnight stays. According to Crystal Cove’s website, reservations are released daily, six months in advance. Make sure you have a Reserve California account in advance and then log in daily before 8am to see any newly released dates. Keep refreshing your screen. “If it looks like everything is booked, then it likely is,” reads the website. “Hundreds of people are also trying to book open dates. Keep trying every morning and you’ll eventually grab your spot!”
If you manage to outwit the reservation system and get an overnight stay, it runs $45 to $300 depending on the cottage. But if you can’t score an overnight at Crystal Cove, I recommend staying at VEA Newport Beach (where I happily stayed for several nights—I did not pull off a stay at the vintage cottages) or the hilltop Resort at Pelican Hill; each of those beautiful resorts is less than a 10-minute drive away.
Entry to the park itself is free, though parking will set you back $15 to $20. A free guided walking tour of the historic district—which is what I took—includes visits inside restored cottages and lasts 60 minutes. Reservations are not required. See website for dates and times.
Final bonus: Visitors can use the all-terrain beach wheelchairs with huge tires to conquer sand and rough terrain. They are free to use on a first-come, first-served basis and can’t be reserved in advance. Several of the restored cottages are dedicated ADA cottages for guests with disabilities.
