There once was a place along the Southern California coast where residents spent leisurely summer days sunbathing on the sand, pulling halibut and perch out of the surf, and where the martini flag was raised each afternoon at 4 o'clock when a trumpet sounded.

"Every night was Saturday night, and Saturday night was New Year's Eve," former resident Stella Hiatt recalled in the 2005 book "Crystal Cove Cottages: Islands in Time on the California Coast" by Karen E. Steen.

On June 26, the martini flag will fly again when California's park system opens Crystal Cove's historic cottages for overnight stays.

Planners hope the 46 cottages, bunched along a 3 1/2-mile stretch of shoreline within the nearly 2,800-acre Crystal Cove State Park, will provide visitors with a sense of the California beach-living experience that residents enjoyed for decades on the slice of Orange County coast between Los Angeles and San Diego.

"Our goal is that when people walk out of the parking lot, they check into a period between 1945 and 1955," said Laura Davick, who grew up in a cottage and now leads the preservation group that will manage the site for the California Department of Parks and Recreation.

On the shrub- and cactus-fringed bluff where the cottages sit, the traffic noises from the Pacific Coast Highway above are muted by the crashing waves. The dozens of new, nearly identical luxury homes pressing against the opposite side of the park are hidden by the rising bluff.

The beach attracted its first visitors at the start of the 20th century, when tent campers from the cities came to spend summer nights. Later visitors built the beach cottages in the 1920s and 1930s.

Many of those summertime cottages became year-round homes, which they remained until the state bought the land and took them over to renovate for park guests.

HISTORIC FUNK

Twenty-two of the cottages, which are listed in the National Register of Historic Places, have been returned to something approaching their original jaunty state. Workers scratched through layers of paint to find and restore pastel shades, and have returned luster to hardwood floors and bathroom tiles.

But the gamey seashore ambiance is still there. Power lines crisscross through the briny air, as they did when the cottages were first linked to the electric grid decades ago. Tattered lobster traps and vintage surfboards — encrusted with generations of wax and sand — remain where restorers found them.

"It's part of the historic funk and fabric of the time," said Eric Dymmel, the park's visitor services supervisor.

Thirteen of the renovated cottages are set aside for overnight guests, with prices ranging from $30 per night for a room in a shared cottage to $175 for a private cottage that sleeps four.

Other cottages will house a visitor center, a marine research lab, and rooms for weddings and other private affairs.

Reservations are difficult to obtain, at least for a while. Less than an hour after administrator ReserveAmerica opened its system for the first time in April, there were 16,000 people on the Internet, each trying to reserve one of the 13 cottages, the company said. ReserveAmerica said it made 420 reservations in the first 30 minutes.

Two dozen remaining cottages, most of which sit at the base of the bluff, yards from the crashing waves, will be renovated in a future phase of the project. These include the two-story brown-shingle house where the 1988 movie "Beaches" was filmed with Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey.

SOUTH SEAS STAND-IN

Starting in the 1910s, before summer visitors built their own cottages, silent-era Hollywood studios used the site to stand in for South Seas locations, said former resident Davick, who co-wrote "Crystal Cove Cottages."

In many cases, the studios left the thatched structures they built for productions like "Sea Wolf" and "Treasure Island" standing on the beach, where they become shelters for summertime squatters, she said.

Newer arrivals built their own cottages from materials that washed ashore or were scavenged. Several houses were built with timber from a wooden schooner that washed ashore in 1927, Davick said.

The Irvine Co., which owned the ranch land that included the beach, began in 1940 to collect rents from those who lived in the dozens of cottages that had sprung up on its property.

In 1979, when the state park system bought the land that now makes up Crystal Cove State Park from Irvine for $32.3 million, the cottage dwellers were given additional 20-year leases.

Many of those residents teamed up with environmental groups to form the Crystal Cove Alliance in 1999, when the park system was about to break ground on a high-end resort where the cabins stand.

The preservation group persuaded parks officials to keep the cottages and their history intact, and to offer them at cheaper rates than the nearby resorts. The nearby Montage, for instance, costs at least $695 a night in the summer. Prices for an entire cottage at Crystal Cove start at $165.

One cottage will be transformed into an eatery by the Ruby Restaurant Group, which runs a chain of 1950s-style diners in Southern California.

It will be modeled after the soda fountain that served the beach dwellers until the early 1960s, Davick said.

The company already has designed a martini flag for the occasion, Ruby's chief Doug Cavanaugh said.

"We're hoping to have at least one person on board who can actually play the trumpet," he said.

"Hopefully we can come up with something better than taps."