Montara villa above the beach asks $6.5 million

For a relatively remote place, 8322 Cabrillo Highway in Montara (San Mateo County) gets an awful lot of attention.

Up until it listed last week, the circa-1946 property, dubbed Villa Montara, served as a venue for weddings and private events; in fact, realtor Justin Fichelson says that Sean “P Diddy” Combs shot a video here once, and that Apple rented it out for an entire year to house engineers.

Fichelson also claims that the two-bed, one-and-a-half-bath house’s remarkable look comes by way of none other than late San Francisco designer Michael Taylor.

The place looks every inch Taylor, embodying his longtime love affair with stone textures and surfaces as well as what he called “the element of contrast”—the key to a great room, in Taylor’s eyes—throughout, playing weathered looking wood off of stucco and interrupting the pleasingly striated nesting of straight interior walls with the abrupt inclusion of a circular glass window.

From the outside, the home’s long wings give way to ranks of gallery windows, like a tremendous aquarium of glass and concrete, all staring out onto a long descent to the beach and the glistening Pacific Ocean below.

Asking is a whopping $6.5 million.

• 8322 Cabrillo Highway [Sotheby’s]
• Villa Montara [YouTube]
• Taylor Designs Thrive [SF Chronicle]
• Ron Mann Designs