- We created a hidden room you can come into.
'Cause what kid doesn't love to sleep in a hidden room?
[energetic jazz music]
We're standing in front of the Sunset Beach Water Tower,
which is a little bit of a misnomer.
I am standing in what's technically Seal Beach, California.
So, one of the big questions is
why are filmin' a show on a water tower?
At the start of about 1985,
they were gonna decommission the water tower
and completely tear it down.
Trains had stopped running.
And the question was, what do we do with a water tower
that's used for water to put into trains?
Well, the problem was, the people of Sunset Beach
really related to it as being the landmark.
In fact, it was Southern California's very first landmarks,
so in 1986, two junior college professors
came in and converted it to a house.
From then until 2017,
much went unchanged in the tower,
and that's when it was bought by myself and a partner,
and we restored it to what we believe is its former glory.
I'm Scott Ostlund, and this is my Southern California
historic and famous clever home.
[energetic jazz music]
As we go through the tower,
everything we tried to do is tell a story
of the days that it was here.
To my right is tools that we took and we put back in.
The trains that would stop and fill up with water
would often develop issues,
and the linesmen would hang out
around the water tower and use tools like this
to go out and repair the water towers.
We have, to my left,
Walter Tower, we call him,
and we actually have 12 hidden Walters throughout the tower,
so if you're here with your kids,
you can go and hunt down and hidden Walters.
But what's a water tower without water?
So one of the big questions is,
can you actually put a home in which was once a water tower?
Will it support the weight of people?
Water weighs about six pounds a gallon,
so if you can imagine thousands of gallons
of water above us,
we did the math one time
and there was something like 2,000 people
that could fit to be the equivalent
of the water that this tower once held.
Incredibly safe to hold people up top.
[energetic jazz music]
Trains in the day carried two things, solids and liquids.
Most of the solids were carried in burlap bags.
Legumes, peas, and the barrels would carry liquids.
So we named this bathroom after the two things
trains carried the most besides people,
and that's barrels and burlap.
We left this piece here
and it was the only original piece from the 1986 remodel,
so you can see the decor in '86
was a little bit different
than the industrial design that we added today.
Now, in honesty, this piece,
we just kinda forgot it and didn't see it,
so we put a little plaque up
and we say that we purposely left it here.
So don't tell anyone.
[energetic jazz music]
A lot of people wonder where the pump is in the water house,
there would have been a pump.
And that pump was taken out a long time ago
and we believe it was in a particular area of the house
that we needed to use.
Really too small for a bedroom, so we hid it back here
and made a secret little bedroom I'll take you into now.
[energetic jazz music]
So, I grew up in the early '70s,
and if you grew up in the early '70s,
of course you watched Scooby Doo,
and in all Scooby Doos,
or at least every other one in my opinion,
there was a hidden room.
As you come up in the hidden room,
the question is, what do you do with it?
In this case, we made it a little extra bedroom.
When the water tower was first built,
it was the tallest residential structure
from ground-to-floor in all of America,
meaning if you have an apartment up in the sky in New York,
300 feet, that doesn't count.
Ground-to-floor, it was the tallest at almost 100 feet.
There was a house now that was built taller
in Prescott, Arizona, but it has nowhere near
the views we have.
I'm gonna go in the elevator
and I'll let you take the stairs.
[elevator dings]
[calm jazz music]
We're not 70 feet in the air on the bottom
of three floors of the water tower.
[energetic jazz music]
So, come outside for what we think's one
of the best views in Southern California of its beaches.
You can see as far south as Newport Beach
and you can see north up to Long Beach,
Palos Verdes, and beyond.
If you look straight out, you can see Catalina.
There's Avalon, Two Harbors.
So this was a deck that would have existed
when the original water tower was here.
Sometimes the tower would spring a leak
and you'd have to repair it,
so they built decks around the tower.
This tower is now used as 360 degrees
that you could walk around the tower
and see views of Southern California.
There's a surf cam that hangs from the tower
and shows how the surf is,
so the local surfers will check out the cam
and see how the waves are doing
to come down and jump in for the day.
[energetic jazz music]
This is the kitchen of the water tower,
we did a new design on old ideas in it.
You can see some of this is actually tile,
and some of it's wood from the original tower.
So we had this sanded and redone,
and this, where you don't want a lot of porous material
in a kitchen is actually a tile.
And we have all the modern amenities of today's kitchen,
but in more of an industrial and throwback design.
You know, as an investor,
you buy things to make money,
and those are done, you hope, with your mind.
And then there's some things you do with your heart,
and so I speak a lot of this house
as things that came from your childhood.
So we put trains that run throughout
the ceiling of the house,
that remind us of why the water tower's here.
Throughout the water tower,
we have some of the more famous cousins of the tower,
the Eiffel Tower, the Seattle Space Needle.
To my left is the stairwell,
it takes you up through three stories.
This stairwell reminds you of a ship.
Everything has a little bit of a industrial
and/or nautical theme,
because we don't wanna forget we're by the beach.
So where we're standing would've been
the bottom of thousands of gallons of water.
Now, at the bottom of the tower,
you can go up and there's three levels of the home
and water would have been filled in that entire area.
The water tower was actually used and pulled off the base
and remilled and put back into the home.
In fact, when we redesigned it,
we kept that same theory,
taking out things and then refurbishing them
and putting them back.
California doesn't have the history of pirates
that's as rich as the east coast,
but we do have a pirate, albeit just one,
and this room's named after this famous pirate
that came down less than a century
before the first structure was built.
This pirate named Hippolyte Bouchard
attacked Monterey and then sailed down
and attacked San Juan Capistrano.
So we named the room after him
and we went back to San Juan Capistrano
and a place called The Barn,
and they sourced things that the pirates would've gone
and attacked, and we put those up in the rafters
of this room along with a portrait
of Hippolyte Bouchard himself.
[energetic jazz music]
This is the first of two bedrooms on the second floor.
Come on in.
This is 70 feet above the air,
so it literally towers above all of the other homes.
In this bedroom is something special
and that's a bathroom I'm in,
the walls revolve around the bathroom
and it creates two different bathrooms.
These walls will spin
and a doorway opens,
the doorway that you're seeing me from,
or it can spin around and open through a hallway,
so it's two bathrooms all in one.
We're not gonna spin the walls for now,
we have 'em locked in place,
the home's used as a vacation rental
and we don't want anyone
getting their hands hurt spinning it around.
Everything is an ode to the circular nature
of a water tower.
This bathroom is round,
every piece of metal we put into it
that's standing above me is round in its nature.
We're now in the second bedroom on the second floor.
This is a door that was actually used
as a front door in both bedrooms, we have this door.
It was pretty badly warped,
we straightened it out and tried to reuse it
just like they did in 1986.
What's great about livin' in a circular home
is there's views everywhere.
We're now 80 feet in the air,
and this is one of two bedrooms
that you can see panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean.
To my left is a picture of the second tower,
the tower's substructure is actually
what we're standing over,
and this is the tower, you can see the deck
along the tower that they would've used
and we walked around on earlier to service that tower.
We're now in the only room in the water tower
that has no walls, in fact,
it's an entire floor, no walls and 360 degree views
of all of Southern California.
On a clear day, you could see the Hollywood sign,
you could see some of the piers up and down the area.
We put markers denoting all of the things.
This one says Knotts Berry Farm you can look out over,
this one says Mount Baldy out in the distance.
Anywhere you go in the room, you can look out
and see a famous Southern California landmark.
And we like that 'cause we think
this was one Southern California's very first landmarks.
And speakin' of first,
this is some of the first steel
that was pulled out of the tower when we redesigned it.
The salt air wreaks havoc on some of this metal,
so in 2016, we went through and pulled out anything
that had corrosion on it and replaced it
with brand new steel and rebar.
So if you're used to looking at a map,
you see Southern California
and you think of it as being west,
the ocean certainly is west of California.
But there's a little trick and not a lot of people
outside of Southern California know that
our beaches really bend and they face south.
So if you look at the beach,
you would be inclined to think that it's west.
To correctly acclimate yourself in the direction
you're at at the tower, we had all of the wood placed
to run at exactly north and south.
And so, if you follow this wood,
you'll see that our beaches are really south-facing,
and not to the west.
And if you don't believe the way the wood faces,
we placed a compass rose in the middle of the room.
And wherever you are,
you can see the way you face.
So, above me, you'll see a propellor,
and some people ask, why a propellor?
There was a night in 1941,
where we thought we were under attack.
When this happened, the water tower was feared
to be an identifier to the Japanese
that would've come in and attacked by plane.
So the propellor that hangs above me
is an ode to the pilots that stood by
in Southern California to defend it from enemy attack.
[bouncy jazz music]
As a real estate investor,
I buy mostly industrial buildings.
And industrial buildings are almost a commodity,
they're boring by nature and easy to value.
You don't decorate them or remodel 'em,
and so I have weekend job and that's going out
and buying famous structures like this
and opening 'em to the public
and enjoying them, using a little bit of the left brain
in the design and ideas and stories
that towers like this tell.
So, I hope you enjoyed spendin' the day
here at the water tower.
I know if I could spend any day,
it would be here at the tower
with some of the best views of all of Southern California.
Thanks for watching.
[smooth jazz music]