Malibu Beach

Location: Malibu
Type: Residential
Year: 2023
Sq. Footage: 5,600

A weekend house on the Pacific Coast Highway, designed by Kelly Wearstler for her own family. Out front, a rock sits in the ocean just offshore, a sculpture by Mother Nature no one ever thought to improve on. The mood is vintage Seventies California, the surf and skate culture that came out of Venice: raw and unaffected, yet innately cool. Across 5,600 square feet on two levels, the plan was opened as far as it would go to bring the outside in, and the palette — driftwood taupe, misty gray, watery green, shell pink — was deliberately subdued, so the ever-shifting sea, slate gray one day and deep blue the next, remains the focal point.

Custom woodwork, a vintage rug, a selenite sconce, and a single vintage sculpture given the room to hold the space. The restraint is the introduction: everything in this house was chosen as though it might have washed up, raw and refined at once.

The house lets its materials do the talking. In the living room, bleached walnut runs underfoot and pale textiles line the walls, and the fireplace is gray Bardiglio: marble chosen, here as everywhere, for a pattern already finished by geology; vintage seating from several decades gathers at the center, beneath ceiling fixtures of Wearstler's own design, drawn from seaweed. The kitchen carries the same conviction into end-cut Douglas fir and Calacatta, the grain and the veining left to carry the room so nothing else has to.

At the center of the house, beneath a vast skylight, a ficus planted in the main foyer rises through both stories. The staircase was conceived as a constructivist sculpture — treads of bleached walnut, a railing in patinated brass of Wearstler's own design — built to bring daylight, fresh air and something living into the heart of the home.

Against the bed, a hand-painted wall: the original from which Wearstler's Channels wallcovering was drawn, a lattice kept just loose enough to stay delicate. Round vintage mirrors read as portholes. In the bath beyond, Cipollino marble runs floor to wall beneath a Seventies cast-glass pendant, with a stone-veneer mirror of her own design.

Beyond the master bath, the walk-in closet is lined wall to wall in bleached oak: paneling so warm and so trim it reads less like a dressing room than the cabin of a private yacht.