House of the Sun

By Barbara Thornburg

Oct. 14, 2007 12 AM PT

Sharon Storey needed a vacation, “somewhere close enough to drive, but far enough away so we felt like we were really on a holiday,” she recalls of that moment four years ago. A friend in the travel business found an oceanfront rental home in Puerto Nuevo near Rosarito, a 2 1/2-hour drive from her Laguna Beach condominium.

She spent the next two weeks taking long walks at the seashore, visiting tide pools with her children and grandchild, and watching whales blow and breach as they swam past on their way to breeding grounds near Baja’s tip. A local woman who helped clean the house by day came at night to cook. “She made us homemade tortillas and tamales,” says Storey. “I thought I had died and gone to heaven.”

The day before the holiday ended, and with her husband back at work in Orange County, the next-door neighbor put up a for-sale sign. She says she agreed to buy the house the same day, and told her husband that evening that they had just bought a house in Mexico. His reply: “When do I get to see it?”

Bob Storey, then a Laguna Niguel real estate agent, saw the house for the first time a month later. He was familiar with the Baja peninsula. His family had owned various trailers at the La Jolla Beach Camp, south of Ensenada, in the late ‘60s and later built a home on the beach at now infamous Punta Banda, where in 2000 many Americans were ejected from homes they had leased on long-disputed land. (He says his father negotiated a deal with the owners and still has a home there.) They both loved the idea of having a Mexican place--so much so that four months later they placed their one-bedroom condo on the market and headed south for good.

It wasn’t easy. The house resembled a tract home and needed new plumbing, electrical work and a roof. The couple spent 14 months taking it apart and putting it back together, living in different sections depending on the construction. They removed the ceiling to install vintage beams, added five more fireplaces and refashioned every rectangular door and aluminum-framed window with rounded corners in the Mexican hacienda style they desired. For nine months they had no kitchen. “We ate out every night and watched a lot of movies on our DVD,” Bob recalls.

They extended the back, enlarging the house from 3,800 to 5,800 square feet, and added an entry wall at the street to create an enclosed courtyard. They painted walls, then ragged them in sunset hues of gold and tangerine to make them look weathered. Outside, they added fountains, a cabana overlooking the ocean, spa, waterfall and colorful plantings of bougainvillea, birds of paradise, statice and geraniums.

Sharon, a former wholesale grocer who has since started a career as an interior designer, decorated the home with custom Mexican furnishings: massive four-poster beds, dark wood buffets and tables, hand-painted tiles and sinks, and traditional palm and leather equipale tables and chairs.

Local stores were wonderful to work with, she says. One in particular, Pancho’s Curios in Rosarito, was especially helpful. “I wanted different stains on our guest bedroom furniture, so the owner sent one of his guys to the house to make sure he got it exactly right. That could never happen in the U.S.” Another time, an artist came to hang his painting in their foyer. No charge. She brought the tile makers a picture that they re-created as a mural above her stove. “People here take huge pride in their work,” she says. “They really go out of their way to make sure you are pleased.”

That’s not to say that everything was perfect. “We joke about it now,” says Sharon. “When someone tells us a time when the bedspreads will be ready, for instance, we ask if it’s American time or Mexican time. Manana could be three weeks from now. But when you get it, it’s beautiful.”

The Storeys’ renovation cost more than $500,000. The house they paid $400,000 for four years ago now is worth about $1.8 million, says Bob, who transplanted his real estate career to Baja. “The equivalent home with all the furnishings would have cost a fortune in Laguna Beach,” he says. “It would have been way beyond our pocketbook.”

The Comps

Location: Puerto Nuevo

Size: 5,800 square feet

Mexican cost: $400,000. Oceanfront homes in the area cost from $1.1 million to $1.8 million,” Bob Storey says.

Laguna Beach cost: $15 million.

Buying Arrangement: Took over neighbor’s 50+50 bank trust (with 47 years left) in 2004.

Advice: “If a deal seems too good to be true, it is.”

--Bob Storey

See Page 72 for Resource Guide