Home Tour for Those Who <i> Do</i> Mean to Pry

Several years ago, Allen Funt, the original Mr. Candid Camera, proved once and for all that people are congenital snoops. He made a movie called “What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?” It was based on the familiar “Candid Camera” format but contained many scenes that never would have been allowed to make it to television.

One gag involved Funt placing a good-looking young woman, dressed only in underwear, atop a stool and behind the huge pane of glass in a storefront window. Passersby barely glanced at her. Then Funt had the glass painted opaque black--all except for one clear patch in the shape of a keyhole. The crowd nearly punched itself silly trying to peek in.

Face it, we’re born nosy. My nephew Russell is about to start crawling, and his parents are busily baby-proofing the entire neighborhood, convinced that once Russell becomes mobile he’s going to want to check out everything from the underside of dad’s car to the phone number for the local Pizza Hut.

They probably just ought to take him on Sunday’s 20th annual Village Laguna Charm House Tour and let him get a good dose of exploring and home crawling out of his system in one easy shot. I took a look at four of the five homes on the tour earlier this week, and I can report that if the kid doesn’t find enough to fascinate him on this year’s tour, then he’s already a TV junkie and needs to be put into rehab immediately.

The tour is organized as a benefit for Village Laguna, a nonprofit group dedicated to preserving what they call the “village atmosphere” of Laguna Beach. Each year, several hundred people board trams at the Festival of the Arts grounds and, one by one, poke their way through five of the more unique houses in town.

(No more reservations are being taken for the tour, but you can show up at the Festival of the Arts grounds Sunday from noon to 3:30 p.m. and get tram seats for $25 each.)

Expect to satisfy your craving for snooping, but also be prepared for a fair-size tug of envy. You are not going to be looking at tract homes.

Art and Kit Spaulding’s house, for instance. Betsy Jenkins, one of the organizers of the event, called it “an original beach cottage,” but it’s light years beyond Frankie and Annette. The place is filled with antiques and covered with clinging vines, some of which have actually been allowed to grow over the sills of the upstairs windows and into the bedroom. It’s 70 years old and not rangy or spacious, but Kit, an interior designer, has raised most of the ceilings, let in the sun with skylights and extra windows and judiciously remodel the place so that what was once a dark and cramped, bungalow-style house on the corner now looks like a sunny, flowering English cottage.

Several blocks--and several-times-bigger mortgage payments--away is the cliff-top home of Jack McNaughton, which overlooks Shaws Cove. Decorated almost entirely in light browns, beiges, golds and whites, the three-level home is done in universally broad strokes. Where the staircase at the Spauldings’ house was a mere 28 inches wide, McNaughton’s place has a large mirrored elevator. The entry hall overlooks a two-story, cascading fountain that descends to an indoor rock grotto. This is the sort of place that gives posh a good name.

High on the hill above is the huge, rambling home of Beverly and Phillip Cuevas. Built into the hillside, it looks as if it might have been transplanted from one of the Pasadena neighborhoods, where broad-shouldered Spanish stucco homes with red-tile roofs have held sway for many years. The Cuevas home has too, since it was built in 1928. The property is actually on two lots, one for the house and the next one for the lawn and rose garden.

The house, Jenkins said, “just keeps going and going and going.” And rising. At the very top is a square tower room--it’s a study--with a commanding view of the coastline.

Easily the most modern house on the tour--it’s about a year old--is the home of Drs. Myra and Marvin Gordon. Designed by architect Mark Singer, the house is stark, angular and done mostly in white, black-and-gray marble and granite with light wooden floors. Three levels tall and built into a steep hillside, the house is nearly all curving glass on the ocean side. Particularly striking is the long, low hearth on the lower level. For the practical-minded, there’s a custom dog tub in the laundry room.

The hands of the owners were not neglected. The stone sculptures around the house were done by Marvin and the interior design by Myra.

The only home I didn’t get to poke my own nose into belonged to Beverly and Gordon St. Clair and was listed under the category “Laguna Original.” It made me wonder: What would a house, in the company of these four other showplaces, look like if it were designated as original ? The Winchester Mystery House? Carlsbad Caverns? The Chrysler Building?

Or maybe there’s just a keyhole painted into the front window. . . .