536 24th Street

Manhattan Beach's Sand Section is the stretch of town between the Strand and the hill, and the listing record places 536 24th Street squarely inside it, in MLS area 142, Manhattan Beach Sand. The house went up in 1948, a single story, detached, two bedroom cottage of 936 square feet, and the county assessor still carries it on its original 2,712 square foot lot. In a neighborhood where the postwar housing stock has largely been rebuilt at a different scale, the record here shows a house that has simply stayed.

The street itself is part of the appeal. One block down 24th Street, at number 455, sits Grand View Elementary, the K through 5 school that serves the Sand and Tree Sections, and the walk continues from there toward the water. In the other direction the blocks run to the North End's shops and cafes and, further along, Downtown Manhattan Beach.

Inside, the cottage reads as it was built: beamed ceilings, hardwood floors, and a fireplace anchoring the main room. The plan is straightforward, two bedrooms and one bath on a single level, with no common walls and a one car garage. The listing style is recorded, plainly and accurately, as Cottage.

The listing leaves the future open, offered as a home to live in as is, to update over time, or to treat as the starting point for something new. The zoning, MNRS-D3, is the same designation that governs its neighbors.

The lot gives the house what most Sand Section parcels no longer have: a grassy front yard facing the street and a sunny backyard behind, planted with a mature orange tree. It is an indoor outdoor arrangement at the scale of 1948, a few blocks from the beach, on a street that still walks to school.