Inside a Malibu beach house with true star quality

For about as long as there’s been Hollywood, there’s been Malibu. A century ago, along an exclusive stretch of sand known as the Malibu Colony, you might have chanced upon Gloria Swanson and Charlie Chaplin engaged in a lively game of table tennis; these days, you might bump into Tom Hanks or Flea. Interior designer Pamela Shamshiri had two very different stars in mind, however, for her recent reimagining of a family house: Lina Bo Bardi and James Bond. ‘We wanted it to be Malibu at its most glamorous,’ she says.

Luckily, the property itself was not short of cinematic charisma. The narrow, half-acre plot featured three structures, built in the late 1990s, that bookended a garden and a pool. These included a pair of two-storey volumes containing a 5,000 sq ft primary residence and guest suites. From the beach-facing main house, with its broad expanses of windows and low-slung profile, it felt like you could almost touch the Pacific Ocean.

Tour this modern Malibu beach house

For the property’s owner Jana Bezdek, co-founder of production company FourthWall Theatrical, the home fulfilled a lifelong yearning to be on the water. ‘My husband is from a neighbourhood called Rustic Canyon and I grew up in Del Mar, California. We were always drawn to being close to the beach,’ she says.

So when she came across the property four years ago, Bezdek pounced. The house would not only serve as a beach escape for her family, but it would also be a romantic nod to her husband, who proposed to her on that very section of beach. To realise her vision, Bezdek tapped Shamshiri, who had previously designed her family’s main residence in LA, as well as her New York pied-à-terre. ‘She was the only person I could imagine working with,’ Bezdek says.

Shamshiri was struck by the compound’s low-slung modernist vocabulary, something of an anomaly in this part of Malibu. A silver screen-worthy concept emerged, one with modernism as its protagonist. ‘We were like, what if it’s 007 at the beach? What if Lina Bo Bardi, her Brazilian modernist friends and a Bond girl could all walk in and have a cocktail?’ the designer remembers. ‘We really treated it as a Brazilian pavilion in Malibu.’

Fortunately, the structures required zero spatial rejiggering, leaving Shamshiri and her team to focus on infusing the spaces with drama. For inspiration, they researched Bo Bardi’s oeuvre – which encompasses some of Brazil’s most renowned modernist buildings – and watched back-to-back Bond films.

For the main residence, which contained the kitchen, living and entertaining spaces on the ground floor and the primary bedroom suite on the upper level, the designer wanted to incorporate ocean views everywhere, even when you weren’t facing it directly. So she installed dark mirrors on all of the surf-facing walls. ‘I love mirrors,’ Shamshiri says. ‘They can act as a portal that transports you to somewhere else. You’re just in a swirl of water in motion.’ Structural steel columns, meanwhile, were painted in a deep ocean blue hue for added effect.

To counter the gleaming surfaces, the design team wanted to create a cocooning sensation. Though the main house was largely open plan, the ceilings were low. Shamshiri and her team ran with it. ‘We accepted right away that the ceilings were low. So we created a sandwich of white ceilings above and white floors below, and then made everything else dark,’ she says.

The team opted for a palette of taupe, mocha and caramel. A wall backing the kitchen was painted black (‘It’s like a faded black T-shirt colour,’ Shamshiri says), while corridors and the primary bedroom were swaddled in a luxurious suede wallcovering (‘It came with a brush!’ she adds).

Entering the open-plan living space, with the ocean waves crashing in view, offers the chance to both take a load off and become the most glamorous version of yourself. The pièce de résistance here is a ‘DS-600’ leather sofa, a 1972 design by De Sede, which snakes across practically the entire length of the room, creating discrete seating nooks within its curves, populated with pieces by Bo Bardi contemporaries such as Joaquim Tenreiro. ‘I love that living room so much,’ Shamshiri says. ‘If you’re two people or you’re 50 people, it doesn’t make a difference.’

The clients love to entertain, so having a standout cocktail set-up was a must. The custom-made timber bar, whose undulating form echoes the shape of the sofa, comes clad in a row of olive-green tiles for a funky kick. You can almost imagine Bond, perched on a ‘Mexique’ stool by Charlotte Perriand, ordering his signature martini. ‘We wanted it to feel that you could be barefoot, in your bathing suit, making a drink, and it still feels elevated,’ Shamshiri explains.

Up a set of floating stairs is the primary bedroom suite. The mood here quietens down, but like the living area, the bedroom is anchored by a statement sofa, a pair of Patricia Urquiola ‘Tufty-Time’ sofas for B&B Italia arranged back-to-back. ‘We emphasised the horizontal, because the horizon is the greatest thing about being at the beach,’ the designer says. There’s also an office space for Bezdek and her husband, where, thanks to mirrors cleverly installed behind the shelves, the ocean is always nearby.

In fact, nature is always close at hand, thanks to lush grounds created by LA-based landscape designer Matthew Brown. Working alongside Shamshiri, he created a series of outdoor spaces including a firepit, a pool deck and, most striking of all, an oceanfront living room. ‘He has such a great way of softening and letting things feel very native in California, but overgrown,’ notes Shamshiri.

One of the guest suites contains a glamorous secret: a screening room where every surface, from the carpet and the ceiling to the Loro Piana fabric on the ‘Togo’ sofas, is drenched in the same crimson hue. ‘If this is Hollywood at the beach, what colour would you want to be drenched in? We were like, red,’ says Shamshiri. Here, Bezdek, her husband and their two young sons can pile in for movie nights. A bar hidden behind the red panelled walls is perfect for hosting friends. ‘Late at night, everyone always ends up in that room, even just to talk,’ Shamshiri adds.

Bezdek and her family are putting the house to good use, hosting impromptu dance parties in the living room and taking in the crash of waves on the terraces. ‘She can intuit someone’s inner vision, and then deliver something far beyond what anyone could have ever imagined,’ Bezdek says of Shamshiri. For the designer, that’s the sign of a job well done. ‘I love seeing how much everyone smiles,’ she says. ‘People just love this house.’

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