Harry Gesner’s Malibu Sandcastle Seeks $28M

A West Malibu beachfront home built by the late Harry Gesner out of salvaged lumber and old telephone poles has hit the market for $27.5 million.

The Sandcastle, a cylindrical-shaped home built by the architect best known for the Wave House next door, has been listed at 33604 East Pacific Coast Highway, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Gesner, an avid surfer, built the 3,000-square-foot home for his family in 1974. The West Coast architect and D-Day veteran died at his Sandcastle home on June 10, 2022. He was 97.

The property is being sold by a trust to benefit three children he shared with his late wife, actress Nan Martin.

The six-bedroom, six-bathroom house is shaped like a sand castle, with a small tower overlooking secluded Watkins Cove, Zen Gesner, a real-estate agent listing the property with colleague Chris Cortazzo of Compass, told the Journal.

It was made of maple lumber salvaged from a high school that had burned down, marble from public baths that were about to be demolished, old telephone poles, old-growth redwood harvested in the 1800s, and windows and doors from one of Hollywood’s silent movie houses.

“My dad really didn’t want to waste anything,” Zen Gesner told the Journal. “If he was working on a job site and they had a whole pile of stuff that was about to be taken to the dump, he’d say, ‘Wait a second, that looks like perfectly good wood. And that looks like perfectly good brick. Why don’t we repurpose it?’”

The brick fireplace in the living room was designed to look like the Hollywood Bowl, Zen Gesner said. With a large polished concrete hearth, it also doubled as a stage for the acting.

The room has wood-beamed ceilings and a formal dining platform. Every window is angled to face the fireplace so that, at night, “you can see the reflection of the fire in every single window coming back to you,” he said.

A spiral staircase with treads handmade out of driftwood leads up to a tower that served as Gesner’s studio.

The three-quarter-acre property has 122 feet of beachfront, a wraparound deck and steps to the sand.

The estate also includes two guesthouses, a three-car garage, an outdoor shower and surfboard storage, according to the listing.

Gesner, a pioneer of sustainable design, sketched his most famous house from a long board while surfing in front of a secluded cove in Malibu, where it was built.

The Wave House, built in 1957 for his friend and fellow surfer Gerry Cooper, looks like a cresting wave. The hand-cut copper shingles on its vaulted roof resemble the scales of a fish.

Harry Gesner was born in Oxnard and raised in Santa Monica. He skied and surfed, and flew his first plane at 14. The actress June Lockhart was his first love, but their romance was cut short by World War II. He was 19 when he waded onto the beach at Normandy.

The decision to sell Sandcastle was tough, Zen Gesner said, but makes sense given that he and his siblings are spread out across the country. He said they hope to find “an owner that will respect and appreciate it as much as my family did.”

— Dana Bartholomew