Carmel / Pebble Beach

This is the entry on the roster most likely to be misread from a distance, and the register would rather say so than be tidy. Neither house here is beachfront in the way the name suggests. At one the ocean frontage is occupied by the eighteenth fairway, and the sand belongs to a separately parcelled club the house owns and operates, whose beach its guests use. At the other the house holds the dune upland and reaches the strand from its own patio by a boardwalk that is a public route.

The gate is the thing visitors remember and the thing that misleads them. Vehicles pay a toll to enter the forest; pedestrians, cyclists and riders enter free, and the coastal trail runs the whole shoreline as a no-fee route. The county land use plan mandates shoreline access at the cove by the pier and the beach south of it, the company has made an irrevocable offer to dedicate pier, stairway and that sand to the State, and a fixed number of public beach-access parking spaces must be preserved. A toll on a car is not a wall on a beach.

The register also says what this place is not. Neither of these shores is a state beach; they are company land inside the forest, with access secured by the land use plan and by a coastal development permit rather than by ownership. The state beach is the named neighbour immediately north, and the register keeps the two apart because a page that blurred them would be claiming public status for private ground and private status for public sand in the same breath.

The season is the whole year, and the houses name their high season by their calendar rather than by a closing date.