A historic, oceanfront Laguna Beach home owned by an heir to the Wrigley chewing gum fortune who was a longtime Catalina Island leader and conservationist is on the market at $11.9 million.
Set on a bluff in Woods Cove, the house belonged to Paxson “Packy” Headley Offield, property records show. Offield, great-grandson of William Wrigley Jr., had been battling leukemia. He died in June at age 63.
The four-bedroom residence, built in the early 1920s, was designed by architect Jean L. Egasse and is “one of the finest examples of Arts and Crafts style in Laguna Beach,” according to John Stanaland of HOM Sotheby’s International Realty, who has the listing. The house has been preserved and is eligible for the National Registry of Historic Places, Stanaland said.
With 2,000 square feet of living space, the two-level home has a kitchen updated in keeping with its original style, a separate carriage house and private access to the sand.
Offield was the board chairman, president and CEO of the Santa Catalina Island Company for 30 years, according to The Catalina Islander. Wrigley Jr. had acquired the company, which controlled the island, in 1919 for $3.5 million. The company still owns much of the island’s roads and parks, the Islander reported, and subsidizes the cost of running the city of Avalon.
The founding chairman of the board of the Catalina Island Conservancy, Offield also had directed the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California and sat on numerous boards of organizations dedicated to preservation, earning awards for his work.
He “took every chance he could to promote the beauty and importance of healthy oceans, lakes and rivers,” his obituary stated.
Egasse, the architect of the Laguna home, originally was from France but spent the last decade of his life designing what became landmark Laguna Beach buildings, according to a historic resources inventory undertaken in the 1980s.
They included homes in Crescent Bay and on North Coast Highway, as well as some commercial structures.
The North Coast Highway home, with turrets, gables and gothic arches, was described in the document as “in that category of dream houses which lends a delightful fairy tale ambiance to Laguna Beach.”
Written by: Marilyn Kalifus
Courtesy of: OCRegister.com
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