Top Gun was filmed partly in and around San Diego County, and the production team used the Graves House as a location for one of the film's scenes. The house behind it — which also appeared in the film — was not so fortunate in the decades that followed. When a hotel development cleared the block in preparation for new construction, three historic buildings on the property were demolished, including that rear structure. A fourth historic building, the Pishon house, was saved by relocation. The Graves House, which had become known as the Top Gun House by then, was retained.

A 1992 Cultural Resource Survey had noted the cottage as 'one of the few 1880s beach cottages remaining in near-pristine condition,' a designation that helped justify its preservation even as the surrounding block was cleared. The cottage is one of the earliest surviving examples of Folk Victorian style in San Diego County — a style characterized by carpenter-ornament decoration applied to otherwise simple vernacular structures.

In 2001, the Save Our Heritage Organisation placed the Top Gun House on its Most Endangered List of Historic Resources. The threat was a hotel planned for the block. The listing was a formal acknowledgment that the cottage's survival was not guaranteed and that organized pressure would be required to protect it.

The Oceanside Historical Society maintained the house and installed signage explaining its historical significance. By 2009, the attention had attracted a different kind of problem: people were breaking into the building. A fence was erected to prevent further damage. The restoration of the structure eventually cost almost $1 million — a significant investment for a single-story Victorian cottage, but one that reflects what it takes to bring a 130-year-old wood-frame building to a usable standard.

The hotel that had once threatened the cottage's existence ultimately became its protector. The Mission Pacific Hotel, which owns the block, took possession of the Top Gun House and established it as an attraction adjacent to the new resort. In 2022, High-Pie opened inside the restored cottage — a pie shop created by Tara Lazar, a Palm Springs restaurateur who owns three restaurants, two bars, a hotel, and a catering company in her home city.

The choice of a pie shop for such a small space was practical: a dessert concept fit the cottage's modest footprint better than a full-service restaurant. Both Lazar and Scott Malkin, the hotel's owner, were fans of apple pie. High-Pie is open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily. The shop's interior includes Top Gun memorabilia, and the Kawasaki GPZ900R replica stands out front on the sidewalk — a prop-adjacent object marking the moment in 1986 when a beach cottage became, somewhat accidentally, part of Hollywood's record.

The Top Gun House is a small building with a complicated history. It was built in the year its city was founded, survived the demolition of its neighbors, was listed as endangered, had to be fenced against vandals, and emerged from a nearly million-dollar restoration as a pie shop. The film connection is the frame through which most visitors understand it, but that connection is incidental — a location choice made in 1985 that attached a degree of pop-culture permanence to a cottage that had been standing for almost a century before the cameras arrived.

The older story is the more interesting one: this is one of the oldest structures in Oceanside, built the same year the city's first pier reached into the Pacific, surviving because enough people decided it mattered. The folk Victorian trim on its exterior is the work of craftsmen who are long gone. The pie shop is the work of someone from Palm Springs who thought the space had possibilities. Both facts are true, and neither cancels the other.