Crescent City redwood-coast cottage

California coastal property is famously unaffordable, with one exception: the far north. Crescent City, twenty minutes below the Oregon line, is the last town on Highway 101 in California, hemmed between the world's tallest redwoods and a wild, driftwood-strewn Pacific. Here a three-bedroom cottage three hundred and fifty metres from the beach costs two hundred and seventy-nine thousand dollars.

The house is a modest north-coast build: single storey, horizontal cedar cladding weathered soft grey, a composition roof pitched for heavy rain, double glazing throughout and a wood stove in the living room. A hundred and twelve square metres holds three bedrooms, two bathrooms, an open plan living and kitchen area, and a mudroom for wet boots and wetsuits. The garden is fenced against the wind, and Sitka spruce screen the western boundary.

This is not a swimming coast in the conventional sense — the Pacific here is cold, powerful and serious. It is instead one of the most spectacular shorelines in the country: kilometres of empty grey sand and silver driftwood, sea stacks offshore, tide pools at Enderts Beach dense with anemones and ochre stars, grey whales migrating past in spring, and the Battery Point Lighthouse reachable on foot at low tide. Behind the town, Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park holds some of the largest trees on earth within a fifteen-minute drive.

Crescent City is a working town — commercial fishing, a harbour, a hospital, supermarkets, a community college — rather than a resort, and that is why the prices hold. There is a small airport with flights to Oakland, Brookings is half an hour north in Oregon for tax-free shopping, and Medford's larger airport is three hours inland. Rain is the trade-off: this is one of the wettest towns in California, with cool summers and mild, grey winters.

For buyers, California conveyancing is standard and open to non-residents, though transfer costs and insurance should be modelled carefully — some north-coast policies now price in wildfire and tsunami-zone factors, and the town sits in a mapped tsunami inundation area, so check the zone of any specific address. Accept those caveats and you own California coastline, redwoods included, for the price of a small condo three hundred kilometres south.