"Sandstone: Close-up of a Unique Life-style", Los Angeles Times, Thursday, April 6, 1972. By Skip Ferderber. Times Staff Writer. In memory of John Williamson (1932-2013), the "Messiah of Sex"

TOPANGA - Although it was not probably intended, a recent State Court ruling has opened the way for a unique community and life-style to continue its highly controversial experimentation with relationships between men and women.

On the surface, the decision of the State Court of Appeals seemed mild enough. The judges struck down a County Ordinance requiring the licensing and regulatio of "growth enters (nudist camps), calling the ordinance :vague and overbroad and in violation of the First Amendmennt to the Constitution which guarantees the right to assembly.

Significantly, the measue endangered tow Topanga Canyon centers: Elysium Fields and Sandstone Foundation.

Both had been threated with closure for operating without a county lixense.

The ordinance defined "growth centers" as any place where three or more persons, not all members of the same family, congegate for the purpose of exposing their bodies in the nude in the presenc eof others.

What neither the ordinance nor the court decision made explicit was the concern by county officials with the openly sexual naturie of the activities in at least one of these centers which, while kpet discrettely away from mass exosure, still flaunts conventional morality.

Certainly, the operators of Sandstone see the decision as a de facto victory for their admittedly unusual way of life which encourages relations beginning on a sexual lever with two and sometimes three or more persons.

But Sandstone, or more formally the Sandstone Foundation for Community Systems Research, Inc. is not a "sex club" or a wife-swapping fraternity, at least in the usual sense.

While there is a definite sexual basis for theor interpersonal relationships, and while they may cross the formal lines of marriage, its proprietors seetheir intermngled lives as research into a more realisitc approach to human relationships.

Sandstone combines an alternative lifestyle, a community, a private club, and a sociological research community, say ts owners. Its headquarters is at 21400 Saddle Peak Road, a clust of neatly kept buildings on a plush 15-qcre hilltop site in the Malibu hills with a magnificent unobstructed view of the ocean>

At first glance, it resembles any number of well-kept homes in the hills: a $500,000 estate complete with a two-try ranch style house, guest cottages, covered swimming pool, a large green lawn, one querter mile back from the road accessible only by driving down a pitted dirt road.

The resemblance ends, however, when a visitor spots a well-tanned man and woman cleaning out the circulating fountain in front of the main house Bothe are nude.

Relaxing inide, in a spacious wood-lined living room with thick beige carpets, are some of the Sandstone's 14 permanent residents, some clothed, some not.

The building reflects te foundation's free and easy life-style. As the administrative and play center for the club, whic lists some 500 members, the vuilding is carpeted throughout, with furniture on the ground floor, and with mats or waterbeds on the lower floors. All the doors are open. Men and women are sitting and talking, some touching in frank sensual way, yer there is no sense of licentiousness. On the contray, the atmosphere is relaxed and tension free.