A Contemporary Malibu Escape Overlooking the Pacific

Details

Contemporary Neutral Pool Terrace with Oceanfront Views

The existing pool received a stunning makeover courtesy of David Tisherman’s Visuals. New custom-colored mosaic tiles by Sicis sparkle in the sunlight, while boulders placed on the beach add a rough juxtaposition. Liaigre’s Courrier table and Archipel chairs on the terrace are all from Thomas Lavin.

Contemporary Neutral Exterior Wall with Sculptural Planters

Planters by Belgian firm Atelier Vierkant, chosen by landscape architect Mark Beall, echo the hue of the home and its elegant orthogonal lines, while the plantings themselves bring sculptural bursts of color. Diamond Landscape handled the landscape installation.

Contemporary Neutral Bedroom Sitting Area with African Stool

In the master bedroom, Rogers & Goffigon fabric covers a pair of Pierre Jeanneret chairs that flank an African stool from Galerie Half, which is topped with a set of copper-alloy cuffs from Douglas Dawson in Chicago. The home’s location allowed Manion to orient the views toward a peninsula.

Contemporary Neutral Bathroom with  Limestone Shower Walls

A Pierre Jeanneret chair offers a chic seat to take in the ocean view off the master bathroom. Limestone from Exquisite Surfaces on the floors and shower walls gives the space a cohesive feel. The plumbing fixtures are by Dornbracht.

Contemporary Neutral Bedroom with Oceanfront Balcony

Sitting atop a rug by Patterson Flynn Martin, custom lamps from Guinevere Antiques in London and night tables in bleached, wire-brushed oak from L’Artigiano Studio flank a custom shagreen bed by both Design Quest Custom and Sunview Finishing.

Contemporary Silver Kitchen with Woven Stools

Two Pierre Jeanneret stools— originally from India’s Punjab University and purchased through Phillips in New York—and a pair of 1950s French stools with woven seats from Wright in Chicago temper the sleek Bulthaup kitchen with their more organic feel. The ovens are by Miele, and the cooktop is Gaggenau.

Contemporary Neutral Dining Room with Original 20th-Century Artwork

The home is filled with original 20th-century works, such as a Le Corbusier armoire from Artcurial in the dining area. A 1947 Max Ingrand antique blue-glass mirror, purchased at Galerie Jacques Lacoste in Paris, complements the armoire. Weiland windows from Crystal Clear Glass frame the views.

Contemporary Neutral Family Room Vignette with Woven-Wood Occasional Table

Custom armchairs and an occasional table rest on a carpet from Mansour in the family room. The owner specified durable upholstery to suit her children and their friends. Inside and out, the walls have a smooth finish courtesy The Plastering Company.

Contemporary Neutral Family Room with Built-In Television

Manion placed the television on the family room’s interior wall farthest from the windows to reduce glare. Shelving by Charlotte Perriand hangs above a custom sectional. The stool is from Galerie Half.

Contemporary Neutral Living Room with Mosaic-Topped Coffee Tables

A pair of 1946 chairs by Jean Prouvé looks at home in the living room. Mother-of-pearl mosaics top twin custom coffee tables by Fantini Mosaici from L’Artigiano Studio. African shawls cover the Pierre Jeanneret settee from Artcurial in Paris. The grouping stands on a custom Patterson Flynn Martin carpet.

Contemporary Neutral Staircase with

Manion’s introduction to the interior starts off as more enclosed and secretive, not revealing the knockout view yet to come. It begins with a breathtaking atrium in the foyer, where a skylight sends light spilling down a curving staircase. “The staircase kind of floats in that three-story cavity and just attaches where necessary,” says builder Rick Holz.

Contemporary Neutral Balcony with Flagstone Flooring

The nearly all-steel framing allowed the architect to create entire walls of glass that nonetheless meet strict earthquake codes. The resulting glass doors lift and stack along each end of every façade, offering access to the outdoors, erasing boundaries between inside and out.

Contemporary Neutral Dining Area with Pacific Ocean Views

In the dining area of a Malibu beach house—reimagined by architect Richard Manion—Pierre Jeanneret’s circa-1950s Committee chairs surround a custom Corian table from Wise Living. Builder Rick Holz had his team slice limestone into flagstone-shaped tiles for a seamless transition between the indoors and the terrace beyond.

A stylistic hodgepodge of a house on a desirable stretch of Malibu beach had little in the way of aesthetics to offer architect Richard Manion’s clients, who were on the hunt for a weekend retreat. The expansive footprint and existing pool, however, proved irresistible, so the couple turned to Manion to help them create a minimalist getaway.

In contrast to their more traditional New England-style residence in Los Angeles, also designed by Manion, “We all wanted to explore a contemporary vocabulary from the start that would be clean, warm and inviting,” he says. The challenges along the way were numerous, including a steeply sloping and skinny lot, height limitations to protect neighbors’ beach views, a footprint dictated by the existing house, and a public beach-access path that ran down the side of the property—not to mention aging plumbing systems near the water that had to be replaced and moved closer to the street.

To begin the project, Manion and his team gutted everything. The guiding principle thereafter was “the idea of a very pure, modern shape with the interest being in the geometry,” he notes. The L-shaped plan wraps around the pool and spa, with the views from the living room and master bedroom above focusing on a peninsula in the distance. The approach plays well to what he aimed to achieve: an elegant yet opaque mass at the street level that hides its surprises. “We wanted the front of the house to be very monumental, very solid and very dense,” says the architect. The solid walls screen a neighbor to one side, and landscape architect Mark Beall installed a ficus hedge on the other side that conceals the property from the public beach path. “In the back, we wanted it to be the opposite—as much glass as possible to take in the views,” adds Manion. The nearly all-steel framing allowed the architect to create entire walls of glass that nonetheless meet strict earthquake codes. The resulting glass doors lift and stack along each end of every façade, offering access to the outdoors, erasing boundaries between inside and out. 

Manion’s introduction to the interior starts off as more enclosed and secretive, not revealing the knockout view yet to come. It begins with a breathtaking atrium in the foyer, where a skylight sends light spilling down a curving staircase. “The staircase kind of floats in that three-story cavity and just attaches where necessary,” says builder Rick Holz. From there, Manion conceived the house as a progression from one moment to the next, where nothing is revealed all at once. “A lot of what we discussed was how things unfold as you walk through the house,” says the wife. “It’s all about how you experience the home in different ways.” A hallway from the foyer, for example, leads to the prize: a split-level living, dining and family room with limestone floors that continue out to a beachside terrace through glass walls, some topping nearly 10 feet and almost disappearing when pulled back. “We spend almost all of our time there with all the doors open,” the wife says.

The warm, creamy stucco on the home’s exterior seamlessly flows inside with plaster colored to match, so none of the walls were painted. “It has this great modernistic simplicity, but it’s not cold like a museum—it’s warm and soft,” Manion says. Against this backdrop, furnishings by such 20th-century masters as Charlotte Perriand, Jean Prouvé, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret fill the home. They look utterly of the moment within Manion’s starkly modern context. And although the walls and floors evoke the color of sand, the rest of the palette takes its cues from the landscape. As the wife puts it, “I like the juxtaposition of the beach setting against our contemporary home and furnishings.”

Beall made sure the exterior landscape spoke the same modern, elegantly spare language as the rest of the home. There was little he could plant in the ground because of the pool and terrace in back and the plumbing infrastructure underneath the driveway in front, so instead he devised a series of highly sculptural living vignettes in pots by Belgium-based Atelier Vierkant. Beall explored a variety of options before he came up with the right plants that were both shapely and sturdy amid the salty ocean breeze. “Keeping the modern theme going with these beautiful pots and textural plants was the direction we wanted to go,” says Beall.

Manion credits all the site’s challenges—in addition to the lengthy permitting process and coastal storms that interrupted construction more than once—for bringing out the best in all the members of the design team. “It was a very unusual opportunity for us,” he says. “But we were all so excited by what we were able to make of it.”

—Jennifer Sergent