Inside Sunset Beach homes
Annexed by Huntington Beach in 2011, Sunset Beach never changed shape. North Pacific Avenue and South Pacific Avenue run parallel for about fifteen blocks with the greenbelt down the middle, and that is the whole community. There are no front lawns to speak of and very few back yards. What a house has instead is height: garage and laundry at grade, kitchen and living one flight up, bedrooms above that, and a roof deck on top of the lot.
That vertical stack decides how we clean here. Sand comes in at the bottom door and travels up three flights on bare feet, so stair treads and the landing outside each bathroom get worked every visit, not occasionally. The deck is its own job, since salt spray and gull mess sit on rails and glass panels all week. Homes on the harbor side toward Peters Landing add dock hardware and a second set of sliders.
The housing stock in Sunset Beach
Lots here are typically 25 by 90 feet, and everything built on them since the 1980s goes up rather than out. A current house is 1,800 to 3,000 square feet across three levels, hard flooring throughout, an interior stair run between every room and often an elevator shaft in the newest builds. Older single-story cottages and duplexes survive in pockets, some under 900 square feet. Nothing on the strip has a lawn to track in, only sand.