The top floor changes your sense of distance completely. Glass wraps around the room in every direction, opening the space to uninterrupted views of the Pacific Ocean, Huntington Harbor, and the San Gabriel River stretching through the landscape below. Cars looked tiny from up there. People disappeared completely. And right in the center of the room sat something even more unexpected: A circular fire pit had been built directly on the granite floor at the center of the room.
Nearby, a 175-gallon fish tank glowed softly against the wood-paneled walls, reflecting the same blue tones as the ocean outside. Nothing about the room felt cluttered. Everything had space around it. Even silence seemed larger up there. “You hear the wind more than the city,” she explained. And she was right. The higher you stood inside the tower, the less connected you felt to the streets below. Not isolated exactly—just removed enough for everything down there to lose its urgency.
For a while, nobody said much. We just stood near the windows watching boats move through the harbor like slow-moving dots against the water. And eventually, we asked the obvious question. Did she ever get lonely living there alone?