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Tuesday, Mar 19, 2024
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History Abounds in Mansion Atop Mount Kelly in Carlsbad

The great room and kitchen.
Photo courtesy of Juncal Real Estate

Many homes in San Diego County have an intriguing and important place in the history of the area. Few, however, have the lineage of 3664 Maria Lane in Carlsbad.

Don Lowe, a realtor with Juncal Real Estate in Carlsbad, has the listing for the Maria Lane home atop what is still referred to on maps as Mount Kelly.

“It definitely has history to it,” Lowe said. “It was originally built in 1940s by the Kelly family, one of the founding families of Carlsbad, it was the final lot that they owned and put their personal house on it.”

Lowe, a North County native, said that some of the house is still original, some wood and beams and non-structural bits and pieces and that “the owner has really kept that alive and it has that history to it.”

But the history of the land goes back to the mid-1870s when Robert Kelly was a partner and property manager of the 13,000-acre Mexican land grant Rancho Agua Hedionda, which was most of what is today’s Carlsbad.

The story of this property is emblematic of the immigrant men and women who made their way across this country with little more than grit and determination to seek their fortunes. Kelly, a 16-year-old émigré from the Isle of Man, came to America in 1841 and traveled across the continent settling in California in 1851, one year after statehood was granted. When Kelly, a bachelor, died in 1890, he left the Rancho to the nine children of his brother Matthew. The land was then divided into equitable parcels and the nine heirs drew slips of paper from a bucket for their inheritance, according to Carlsbad’s historical records.

One of those parcels was 240 acres that had been sold off during the years, bit by bit, to the last remaining three-quarters of an acre on Maria Lane.

Lowe said the current owner bought the home in the mid-1980s and for a while lived in it as it was. He said “then they blew it out and added everything on.” The reconstruction was finished in 2001.

The home has the look and feel of what might be found in a prosperous vineyard in Italy. It’s covered in stone with a red-tiled roof and evokes an aura of history and prosperity.

“It’s like a Rancho Santa Fe house, but you’re not in the boonies,” said Lowe, who also owns Advanced Real Estate Appraisal. “You get your mail at your house, easy access to freeways, the beach in five minutes and all the nearby conveniences.”

The one-level, 8,000-square-foot home has five bedrooms and four-and-a-half baths with unsurpassed panoramic ocean views to La Jolla to the south and Dana Point to the north. The asking price is $4.69 million.

“There’s a true 2,300 bottle wine cellar,” Lowe said. “It’s not a wine room or wine closet; it’s literally under the ground, below grade, with temperature and humidity control; all the requisite things you need.”

Lowe said it has a detached 442-square-foot gym, a putting green, a massive pool/spa, solar panels, outdoor lanai with a fireplace, a covered viewing deck on the top of the house with another fireplace, handmade brick, “there is nothing here from Home Depot or Lowe’s, it’s all handcrafted and imported — highest-level stuff.”

The nearly 12,000-square-foot outdoor living area has built-in heat lamps in the ceiling and skylights with a patio that has bricks that are laid out diagonally throughout the entire space.

“There’s two of everything,” Lowe said. “Two dishwashers, two refrigerators, two refrigerator drawers, four freezers, just everything you need.”

The pool was redone in the past four or five years to add a “baja ledge, where you sit halfway in the water, and can put your umbrellas in there.”

The entryway foyer is 18 feet high, the custom front doors are 14 feet high, “all the finest materials,” Lowe said.

One of the more interesting finds during the renovation was a curious medallion dated 1933 and imprinted with “Geodetic Survey Triangulation Station.” The owners retrieved the marker from the driveway and it is now displayed on a wall.

Lowe said from the layman’s research he did, geodetic markers were in use before there were any true good maps. Surveyors often used the highest point in the town as a sort of landmark. Hence the name Mount Kelly.

“Everything was based off that,” Lowe said. “Four furlongs to the southeast, past the oak tree, that kind of thing.”

Lowe said, however, that there was an unfortunate error on the medallion.

“They’ve got an “e” in the name and all the schools and streets are Kelly,” he said. “Which is classic, there wasn’t any spell-check back then.”

Send luxury real estate items to sglidden@sdbj.com.

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