Today AD travels to the rugged shores of Malibu, California to tour Sandcastle House, the remarkable family home of architect Harry Gesner. This stunning property was born from a promise to Gesner’s wife to build her dream house on the shores of Malibu. This one-of-a-kind home is made almost entirely from reclaimed materials salvaged from surrounding areas and inspired by the structural design of a sandcastle. But what makes Sandcastle House so special is Gesner built it with his own two hands for his family, making it a true labor of love.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 (gentle music)
00:02 Welcome, my name's Zen Gessner.
00:16 I'm the son of Harry Gessner,
00:17 who's the architect of the Sandcastle.
00:20 33604 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, California.
00:25 The Sandcastle is a one of a kind structure.
00:27 My father built it with reclaimed materials.
00:30 The property has six bedrooms.
00:32 There's three in the main Sandcastle
00:34 and three in three separate apartments
00:37 surrounding the property.
00:38 122 feet of beach frontage
00:41 on a very secluded North Malibu Cove.
00:44 It was the late '60s and my father proposed to my mother
00:48 right up there on the bluff
00:49 and pointed down to this empty lot and said,
00:52 "Nan, if you marry me,
00:54 I'll build you your dream house down there."
00:56 He wanted to build a house
00:57 that was the ultimate family beach house,
01:00 something that promoted creative thought.
01:03 He had a unique way of starting a project
01:06 and that was usually to go and camp out on the job site
01:10 before anything was ever built there
01:11 to assess how nature interacted with it.
01:15 I was about one and we were sitting out on the beach
01:19 and in my father's book,
01:20 he has a picture of us building a sandcastle
01:23 and on the back of that photograph,
01:24 he wrote, "Let's build a sandcastle for mommy."
01:27 [gentle music]
01:31 So now we're in the sandcastle.
01:37 I had told you before that my father built this house
01:39 for my mother.
01:40 She was a Broadway actress
01:42 and so he designed this fireplace
01:45 like a Greek theater show.
01:47 The hearth is the stage
01:49 and the sunken living room is the theater house.
01:52 99% of this house is built from reclaimed materials.
01:56 My father believed that older materials
02:00 had a life to them, a soul.
02:02 So the floor is maple.
02:05 It's from a school that was burning down.
02:06 The fire chief called my father and said,
02:08 "Harry, you better come down here.
02:10 Maybe there's some good planks in there."
02:11 My father went down, shaved off a little bit of the char
02:14 and saw there was beautiful maple underneath.
02:17 So he grabbed as much of it as he could
02:19 and put it into the floor of the house.
02:21 The walls of this house, this is old growth redwood
02:25 from aqueduct pipe that was in Northern California.
02:28 The brick in the fireplace is from a building
02:31 that was being demolished downtown LA.
02:33 These support poles are old telephone poles
02:37 and they have a beautiful design pattern to them.
02:39 Those stained glass windows
02:41 that are over here in the greenhouse,
02:44 my father got a call from a fire chief, once again,
02:47 said, "Harry, they're tearing down this beautiful church
02:50 in Pasadena.
02:51 They're taking all of this beautiful stained glass away.
02:54 Do you want any?"
02:56 With a living room that's built like this,
02:58 you really appreciate so much of the exterior.
03:01 Having floor to ceiling windows
03:03 fringe the entire front end of this.
03:06 One very cool fact is that he built this fireplace
03:10 and then angled every single one of these windows
03:14 to reflect the firelight at night.
03:16 He wanted to build a house that communicated
03:18 and communed with nature.
03:20 And that's what you feel in this living room space.
03:23 This house has no foundations.
03:26 It was built on a dinner plate of concrete
03:29 that is on sand, which is non-compressible.
03:32 Whenever there's been an earthquake,
03:33 we hardly feel it at all.
03:35 It just rides it out like almost a boat on the ocean.
03:39 Even over 50 years, it hasn't tilted at all.
03:43 [upbeat music]
03:46 [upbeat music]
03:49 This is the dining area on the corner of the living room.
03:51 When I was younger,
03:52 this is how my father would call me in from surfing.
03:55 The meal would be cooked in the kitchen
03:57 and the table would be set here
03:59 and he'd go out right to this door.
04:04 He'd open it up.
04:05 [horn blowing]
04:10 And believe it or not,
04:13 you can hear that all the way out in the water.
04:16 This was also where we would have our Thanksgiving's,
04:20 our Christmas dinners, family get togethers.
04:23 It was always a lot of fun at night.
04:25 We'd have music and the fire going in the living room
04:27 and some amazing food, just great.
04:30 [upbeat music]
04:33 My father in the '60s, late '60s,
04:38 was commissioned to do an interior decorating design
04:41 of a kitchen in the Los Angeles Convention Center.
04:44 They were taking it apart and they said to my father,
04:48 "Well, we're just gonna be throwing this stuff away.
04:50 "Do you want it?"
04:51 And my dad said, "Absolutely."
04:52 So this round chopping block, the countertops,
04:55 the round bar, this whole design that you see here
04:59 came from an installation
05:01 that was at the LA Convention Center
05:02 and my father just made it work seamlessly in this house.
05:06 I love these little touches, the hot plates,
05:09 beautiful old tile that are scattered
05:11 around the center table here.
05:13 And you have all your cooking knives
05:16 are all right here at hand.
05:18 We also have a beautiful fireplace over here
05:20 that was always lit at night.
05:22 And this is really where the community came and hung out.
05:25 For a while, we had Rod Stewart next door
05:27 who had come over here and suddenly the door would open
05:30 and hey, here comes Rod.
05:32 It was just the community center.
05:33 Everybody felt comfortable coming and hanging out here.
05:36 [upbeat music]
05:40 This is my first bedroom, a lower floor of the sand castle.
05:45 This was the original room I kind of grew up in
05:48 until the age of seven.
05:49 And you can see a little indication of it
05:51 over there by the door.
05:53 My father converted this into an office for his later years.
05:58 So this could be an office.
06:00 It could be converted back to a bedroom.
06:02 But I think a really special point of this
06:04 is the greenhouse.
06:06 You really feel a connection to nature
06:09 and having this kind of indoor, outdoor feeling.
06:12 It's very peaceful, especially in the afternoon
06:15 when the afternoon sun hits those stained glass windows
06:18 and just projects all the light and color into the room.
06:21 It's just gorgeous.
06:22 [upbeat music]
06:25 Tons of circles.
06:29 There's circles everywhere.
06:30 The whole room, the sunken area over here
06:33 with the primary bed right there.
06:35 You look up and you have these vaulted ceilings
06:38 with this beautiful, beautiful circle design.
06:41 At the top of the staircase,
06:42 you have this yellow stained glass window
06:45 that is almost like you're looking through a magical lens.
06:49 In the primary, you have this great little fireplace,
06:52 but on the other side of it,
06:53 you have a daybed that looks out over the entire ocean.
06:56 It's where my mother used to read her scripts.
06:58 It's where I'd used to just hang out
07:00 and read books or draw.
07:03 There's a story about this,
07:05 which leads up to my father's design studio.
07:08 My father used to get up there, up a ladder,
07:12 and scurry up the ladder through a small hole at the top.
07:15 One day he was up there designing
07:16 and he looked out at the ocean
07:18 and he saw a tree floating by.
07:20 So he jumped on the ladder, came down,
07:22 grabbed a surfboard, paddled out,
07:24 and dragged it in to shore.
07:26 Got me and a bunch of my surf buddies
07:28 to help him drag it up,
07:30 tie it to a Monterey pine that's just outside,
07:33 and we started sourcing out individual pieces of driftwood
07:37 to make the steps.
07:38 We put this whole thing together out there,
07:40 including laminating this handrail all around the tree.
07:44 And then we took it all apart
07:46 and brought the whole thing in
07:47 through this two foot window down here
07:50 and rebuilt the whole thing inside.
07:53 And this is now the way up to the design studio.
07:56 The design studio above is a magical space.
08:00 I think it would make an amazing painting studio.
08:02 It's like all of the energy of the house
08:05 is all centered around this tower.
08:08 And like a lighthouse, that's where the light comes from.
08:11 (upbeat music)
08:14 This was one of the places that I spent most of my youth.
08:19 This backyard patio area
08:21 with all this reclaimed brick on the ground.
08:24 We would have amazing parties here.
08:26 This whole space would just be alive
08:28 with people and seafood that we had caught
08:31 out in the kelp bed.
08:33 This outdoor area here,
08:34 it really kind of lended itself
08:37 to being a community center.
08:39 The shape of the house was very welcoming to people.
08:42 I think the fact that it was round, unconventional,
08:45 so creative, it was exciting for people to visit.
08:48 The kelp forests that are just off the beach
08:51 are some of the most beautiful in the state of California,
08:54 full of life.
08:55 Growing up surfing out here was always an adventure.
08:59 Sometimes you want to step inside
09:01 and take a break from the sun.
09:03 We've got a cabana over here.
09:05 It started out as a garage for our cars,
09:09 then turned into a games room,
09:11 then into my father's archives.
09:13 And now it is a very comfortable cabana.
09:15 So you surf, you come in for lunch,
09:18 you have a seat, read a book,
09:19 and go back out and surf again.
09:21 It's a good lifestyle.
09:23 And now I'm gonna take you up above the cabana to the nest.
09:26 (upbeat music)
09:31 Welcome to the nest.
09:32 We have a little kitchenette over on this side.
09:35 This is set up as a recording studio right now,
09:37 because one of my sons is a musician
09:39 and he's doing a lot of creative work out here.
09:42 But this is where I spent my youth and my teens.
09:45 It echoes the same round structure as the main sandcastle.
09:49 Growing up out here was a bit like Swiss Family Robinson.
09:52 The fact that my father really built this with his hands
09:56 and the property evolved every year.
09:59 There was always something new,
10:00 something exciting.
10:02 The stained glass window here,
10:04 the panels on this door over here,
10:06 they came from another house that was being demolished.
10:09 And of course you have this amazing view.
10:11 When I woke up in the morning as a kid,
10:13 I had that in front of me and there's the entire ocean.
10:17 (upbeat music)
10:19 So we're standing in the tree house apartment,
10:24 which is on the front end of a three car garage.
10:28 You have one bedroom here,
10:30 you have a bathroom, shower.
10:32 It has a great kitchen area,
10:34 a great dining area with these floor to ceiling windows
10:37 that look out over the sandcastle and out to the ocean.
10:41 And one of the most amazing views of the whole property.
10:45 It's really special up here.
10:48 When we built the tree house,
10:52 we put wooden bowls on this tree and the birds loved it.
10:56 So this really did become a tree house,
10:59 birds included.
11:00 (upbeat music)
11:03 We are in the boathouse.
11:07 This is a separate apartment
11:09 and we are currently standing in the living room area.
11:13 This is a great, great guest apartment.
11:16 There's plenty of room for a family to stay here.
11:18 You have a very comfortable sitting area.
11:21 You've got a kitchen,
11:22 you've got a bedroom and a bathroom with a shower,
11:26 all filled with beautiful little touches.
11:29 There was a battleship that was decommissioned
11:33 and they were tearing it apart
11:34 and taking all the steel and everything
11:36 and repurposing that into other boats and ships,
11:40 except for the portholes
11:41 that they were just gonna throw away.
11:43 And my father thought that was ridiculous.
11:46 So he found a way to incorporate it.
11:50 This mural that's behind it, a family member of ours,
11:54 she stayed out here for about two weeks.
11:56 We had no idea what she was doing
11:58 and basically she left.
12:00 And when we came up to see the place, it was all painted.
12:04 And she did this beautiful undersea mural.
12:07 (soft music)
12:26 My father felt that to live in a structure
12:29 that challenged your mind, nothing would ever get boring.
12:33 There'd always be something new to see,
12:35 somewhere new to sit.
12:36 He believed in marrying a design to the environment.
12:40 Being on the beach, a sandcastle,
12:43 being pretty much the root of the inspiration
12:46 for the design, he felt this would fit and it does.
12:50 People walk down the driveway, walk into this house
12:53 and it takes about 15 minutes and they're changed.
12:57 And it has to do with the magic that this house creates.
13:01 It's like you're stepping into another world.
13:05 (soft music)
13:07 Sandcastle is a bit of everything.
13:20 It really is a perfect example of who my father was.
13:23 To some people, it looks medieval, like a castle.
13:26 To some people, it looks like a Dutch windmill.
13:30 To some people, a Spanish lighthouse.
13:32 I think that whoever lives here
13:35 can't help but evolve with it.
13:38 This is a very specific place
13:41 with a magical quality about it.
13:43 There's nothing ordinary, nothing boring.
13:46 For the first time on the market,
13:48 from my family to yours.
13:51 (soft music)
13:53 (wind howling)