The Malibu Beach House’s broad, buff-colored facade is such an understated, unembellished plane that even its garage door is barely discernible. The only tip-off to the complexity within emerges at the wall’s entryway opening. It frames an outdoor vestibule, where black-and-white diagonal-striped murals flank mirror-polished steel doors, replicating the banded patterns deep into imaginary space. These paired murals, by artist Sol Lewitt, took inspiration from “dazzle” painting, an Op Art–like technique that rendered military ships optically inscrutable, beginning in World War I. Once over the threshold—or behind the “looking glass”—it becomes apparent that playful manipulation of perception permeates the entire place, as do multiple perspective-altering murals by the same artist.
“I think of a house both in terms of its architectural and its domestic concept, or program,” says architect Michael Maltzan, who designed this beachfront retreat for art collector and Creative Artists Agency cofounder Michael Ovitz, whose main residence, elsewhere in Los Angeles, Maltzan’s firm had completed in 2009. At 10,700 square feet, the Malibu house, for Ovitz and his fiancée, Jimmy Choo cofounder Tamara Mellon, is hardly a beach shack, yet this two-bedroom home—plus guest quarters, where children and grandchildren are welcome—opens itself almost casually to sand and surf. But its conceptual underlay is more elaborate, casting the building as an optical instrument, through which the artwork and seascape are viewed.
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