Above the clouds, looking west to the glimmering San Francisco Bay and east, on a clear day, all the way to the Sierra, sits the most audacious home in the Bay Area. Built directly on top of Twin Sisters, on the border of Solano and Napa counties, there's no house quite like it: Californians generally prefer parks to residences on their mountaintops, but the Glass House overlooks the North Bay like a watchtower.

Razed by fire in 2017, over the past few years, it has been reborn. And although its original owner no longer lives there, his dream sparkles again, its floor-to-ceiling windows glinting in the sun. As to why he was forced to leave his dream home, well, that's quite the tale.

"When someone says to you, 'Your money or your life,'" John Roscoe once said, "it's best to give them your money."

The Glass House started with cheap cigarettes. In the late 1950s, Air Force veteran John Roscoe began opening convenience stores across the western United States. He later decided to pivot the business to something more lucrative: discount smokes. Under the brand Cigarettes Cheaper, Roscoe's business exploded. By the 2000s, he had over 800 stores across the nation and, at the height of his nicotine empire, was bringing in about $1 billion in annual revenue.

With success came a platform, and Roscoe used his to loudly assert his libertarian values. He wrote "bagatorials" on the paper bags used in his stores, publishing mini tracts about the virtues of small government and grievances against politicians. He also adored a publicity stunt -- and abhorred a permit. In Lathrop, he put green aliens on top of his SuperCheaper! store in the 1990s. He was cautioned that a strong gust would be enough to blow one off, but Roscoe ignored the warning. In short order, one of the aliens fell onto a car. In 1994, inspired by the blockbuster "Jurassic Park," Roscoe used a helicopter to fly a 50-foot brachiosaurus over the Bay Area and onto the lot of one of his stores in Dixon. Dixie the dinosaur was an instant hit, becoming an unforgettable landmark on Interstate 80 until county officials told him he couldn't have a structure that tall without a permit.

"We should be encouraging people to do the spectacular, things that people like," Roscoe complained to the Sacramento Bee. "We shouldn't throw roadblocks in their way."

With his windfall, Roscoe did more than commission giant statues. He began buying up parcels on Twin Sisters, the mountain that looms over Suisun Valley. Unlike many other Bay Area ranges, Twin Sisters is privately owned by dozens of landowners, with houses dotting the hillside from top to bottom. Eventually, Roscoe and his wife Marilyn accrued 1,700 acres of the mountainside. They set to work on their "House Above the Morning Clouds."

Architect Helena Arahuete was hired for the project. In a recent email to SFGATE, she said the Roscoes "wanted to see all the views all the time, no matter where they were standing." Looking to appease John's desire for a place to "think great thoughts," Arahuete created a glass design with sight lines from every room. A unique sloped roof, notched around a central courtyard like a daisy unfurling its petals, gave it a hexagonal shape. A blue tile swimming pool was cantilevered off the main room, allowing the Roscoes to start a swim indoors and end up outside. To obscure the home from the winding road down the mountain, Arahuete even carved out part of the peak to lower the home.

"It is not really prominent," John told the San Francisco Chronicle, which featured the home in 2005, not long after it was completed. "From a distance it looks like nothing more than a tree on top of the hill."

This was not a widely shared opinion in Solano County, where I grew up. When the house went up, locals were astonished that someone was allowed to build on the top of Twin Sisters. During certain times of day, the sun created harsh reflections off the windows. One evening, our neighbor approached us and said she'd seen the bright lights of a UFO perched on the mountain night after night. It didn't take us long to figure out that it was the Glass House, all lit up.

The home was an industry darling, though, earning features in trade magazines across the world, including Architectural Digest. The Roscoes dubbed their new abode "the Most Spectacular House in America," Arahuete recalled. But the home, and John Roscoe, were flying a bit too close to the sun. Trouble was brewing with Cigarettes Cheaper.

In 2007, the FBI announced John and his son Ned Roscoe had been indicted by a grand jury. According to federal prosecutors, the Roscoes' cigarette business had been faltering for years. In 2000, Cigarettes Cheaper signed a loan agreement with Comerica Bank that allowed the company to borrow against the value of its inventory. In order to borrow increasingly higher sums, the FBI said the Roscoes began sending fake financial documents to Comerica, knowingly inflating the value of their inventory by over $16 million. Suspicious bankers unraveled the scheme, tipping off the FBI in the process.

In 2012, Ned Roscoe was sentenced to five years in prison. John, then 82, opted to plead guilty so he could avoid jail time; he was given five years of probation. His business crumbling, John Roscoe handed over his beloved mansion to the bank, and the Glass House was sold to Texas philanthropists Jesse and Cathy Marion. Their joy in the home was short-lived. Seven miles north, the Atlas Fire sparked amid lightning storms in October 2017. The fire ripped over the Howell Mountains, engulfing over 50,000 acres and leaving the Glass House a melted pile of metal in its wake.

For years it sat, its twisted wreckage reaching toward the sky like crow's wings, but in 2023, the site returned to life. Construction cranes could be seen from Suisun Valley, and the structure began to rise -- with some changes. Although the Roscoes' emphasis on views was understandable, the extremely windy conditions on Twin Sisters made for some unfortunate consequences. The Marions reportedly never used the incredible swimming pool because it was simply too windy to bear, and the petaled roof design created a "vortex" that pulled passing birds into the middle courtyard. Swatt, one of the architecture firms hired to reimagine the home, added wind breaks and altered the roof.

"We made some significant changes to the design while doing our best to respect the integrity of the original design," partner Robert Swatt wrote to SFGATE.

"The original design was fabulous," Swatt added. "We think our design modifications were also fabulous."

The house, renamed Mystic Ranch, is fully rebuilt, once again surveying the scenery from ocean to mountains. Although the Roscoes moved to Arizona ("I should have gone into the pizza business in 1956," John Roscoe rued to the CSP Daily News after his indictment), one remarkable souvenir remains on the property at 1700 Twin Sisters Road.

Around 2005, Dixie the dinosaur disappeared. After being pulled from her Dixon location, she briefly guarded a Roscoe-owned property in Benicia. But then, one day, she was gone. Rumors persisted that she had been taken apart and left somewhere up on Twin Sisters. When the Atlas Fire blackened the mountain, locals figured she, too, was destroyed in the blaze.

If you look on Google's satellite view, at the end of a trail stamped into the earth by tire treads are six distinct pieces of a fiberglass brachiosaurus. Through helicopter rides and apocalyptic fires, Dixie has survived. Her long neck is placed beside her tail, her head forever gazing in the direction of the Pacific Ocean.

"The vistas we see morning and night are life-changing," Marilyn Roscoe once said.

Now, Dixie is the only Roscoe left to enjoy that view.