Miles Minor Kellogg grew up with the ocean in his blood. His father was a sea captain, and when Kellogg turned his hand to construction in Encinitas — a coastal town whose very name nods to the oaks that once shaded its hillsides — he decided that the Pacific setting deserved something more than ordinary bungalows.

Working without architectural plans, Kellogg shaped two residences to look like ships run aground, bow first, on a residential lot. The structures have two floors each, and every design detail reinforces the nautical illusion: rounded hulls, portholes instead of conventional windows, and an overall form that makes passersby do a double take before realizing they are looking at a house, not a vessel. Behind the twin boats, Kellogg also built a four-unit apartment complex — practical income property that helped anchor his unusual creative experiment.

The houses were completed in 1929, and from the beginning they attracted curiosity. North Coast Current, a local news outlet, would later declare them the most photographed buildings in Encinitas — a distinction that says something about the power of a good visual joke sustained across a century.

For most of their life the boathouses served as private residences, quietly delighting the neighborhood while the rest of Encinitas grew up around them. When the Encinitas Preservation Association recognized their irreplaceable character, the organization made the considerable financial commitment to purchase both the boats and the apartment complex behind them, paying $1.55 million in 2008.

The association's vision is to eventually convert the boathouses into a museum, a place where visitors can step inside and understand what drew Kellogg to translate maritime dreams into residential architecture. For now, the buildings remain rented as private homes while the association works to pay off the purchase loan — a slow, determined effort to preserve something genuinely irreplaceable.

On October 21, 2019, the United States National Register of Historic Places made it official: the Encinitas Boathouses earned a formal designation as a significant piece of American architectural history. The category that applies to them — novelty architecture — is a small and delightful corner of the built environment, reserved for structures whose form is so deliberately shaped like something else that the reference becomes the entire point. Most novelty buildings are commercial enterprises trying to catch a driver's eye from the highway. The Encinitas Boathouses are something rarer: a pair of homes whose owner simply wanted to live as close to the sea as possible, even when standing on dry ground.

The story of the boathouses is partly about eccentricity and partly about affection. Kellogg did not build them to attract tourists or generate press coverage; he built them because he was inspired by the ocean setting of the town where he chose to live and work. That the structures have endured nearly a century, survived a real estate transaction worth over a million dollars, earned a federal historic designation, and become the most-photographed buildings in their city suggests that genuine imagination — even when expressed in something as humble as residential construction — tends to last.

Encinitas incorporated as a city only in 1986, but its communities and its coastline have drawn people for much longer. The boathouses predate incorporation by more than half a century, and they outlasted whatever was considered stylish when they were built. They are a reminder that some of the most durable architectural statements are not made in glass and steel by famous firms, but in wood and concrete by someone who simply refused to build something ordinary.