Richard Halliburton's Laguna Beach Hangover House

Richard Halliburton swam the length of the Panama Canal, flew a biplane around the world, and crossed the Alps on an elephant before commissioning this house 600 feet above the Pacific in Laguna Beach, a vantage that gave it its name: Hangover House. Architect William Alexander Levy, a recent NYU graduate at the time, built it in 1937 using concrete and steel construction rare for California residential work of that era, and Ayn Rand is believed to have visited and later based the Heller House in The Fountainhead on it. Halliburton disappeared just two years later, lost while trying to sail a wooden junk across the Pacific from Hong Kong to San Francisco. The house was featured in a 1938 edition of Architectural Record and is considered among the early masterpieces of modern residential architecture in Southern California. The current two-bedroom main residence runs about 2,500 square feet on a nearly 20,000-square-foot lot, with an original spiral staircase climbing to a rooftop deck that wraps 360 degrees around the coastline and canyon below. The structure has been fully restored, its concrete and steel reinforced and its wiring and plumbing replaced, leaving only the kitchen, bathrooms, and a lower guest suite to finish. The sale also includes an adjacent lot with pulled permits for a contemporary guest house and infinity pool.