Peter Choate designed the house in 1978 for a bluff at the top of Zumirez Drive, the Point Dume street that runs out to the ocean, and it sold on September 16 for $28,066,970. Behind the gates a hundred-foot drive passes under eucalyptus, over a bridge and a pond, and arrives at a white farmhouse with a slate roof and copper gutters.

The rooms are plain in the way that suits the site: oak floors, French doors on the ocean side, a living room with a wood-burning fireplace under beamed ceilings, and a kitchen of white cabinetry, honed Calacatta marble, and brass nautical fittings with a curved bench in the breakfast nook. Upstairs the primary suite has eleven-foot beamed ceilings, a gas fireplace, and the ocean and Catalina straight ahead. Four more bedrooms take Juliet balconies and dormer windows. Seven bedrooms and six baths in 5,764 square feet.

The 1.57 acres carry orchards, lawns, specimen trees, a pool, a bluestone fire pit, ocean-view decks, a conservatory, and a generator. The asset that sets the price is a private gate to Little Dume, the cove below the point, reached from the homes above it and from nowhere else.