A Sonoma County property that offers a “mystical portal” to the sea has hit the market for $8 million.
The house 97 Stone Crop Reach in Sea Ranch was designed by renowned architect Carson Bowler, whose legacy spans five decades of iconic residential and commercial structures in California, SFGate reported.
Pattie Lawton of Sotheby’s International Realty has the listing.
The house, originally constructed in 1972 on 1 acre of land, was renovated in 1997 by architect Obie Bowman. It has five bedrooms, a living room, an office, a game room, a sauna, and multiple decks, one of which features a hot tub.
A major selling point is the”mystical portal.”
“The portal is a long corrugated tube that runs from this bedroom, travels through the home, and out to the exterior — and brings the sounds and view of the ocean waves into this room,” Lawton told SFGate in an email.
Communal amenities include access to 55 miles of hiking trails, heated outdoor swimming pools, and numerous sports courts.
The listing comes at a time when the number of Greater Bay Area homes on the market over the past year hit a two-decade low over the summer.
New listings in May throughout the 11-county region fell below 80,000 homes, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, citing figures from Compass.
That’s down from a pandemic high of more than 100,000 homes in mid-2021 and the all-time high of more than 180,000 in 2006.
The number of home sales, the lowest since the Great Recession in 2008 in a region that includes Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, fell last month to fewer than 60,000, according to the Chronicle.
The low number of new listings, calculated on a 12-month rolling basis, has helped drive up prices in the Bay Area, now among the highest in the nation, though less than during the pandemic boom, experts said.
The region’s median home price shot up 17 percent to $1.23 million between February and March, hitting $1.25 million in April, while buyers faced a shortage of homes for sale. The culprit: high interest rates, with potential sellers unwilling to trade up for pricey loans.
“In 2023 so far, increasing demand despite the much higher interest rates … has been confronted with severely depressed levels of new-listing activity, and this has put upward pressure on prices,” Patrick Carlisle, chief market analyst for Compass, told the Chronicle.
— Ted Glanzer