Luxury Home · Architecture + Coastal Approvals
Pacific Coast Hwy Residence
Malibu
Project perspective
Pacific Coast Hwy Residence is a beachfront house in Malibu by Apel Design, carried from the first site study through civil engineering and into entitlements and coastal approval.
The design story
From the road the house is deliberately quiet. A single low roof plane runs across the front with a timber soffit under it, the entry sits behind full-height glass, and the garage is finished in the same timber so the street sees one composition rather than a house and a car door. Planting is dense to the boundary, which is what gives a beachfront lot its privacy on the landward side.
The seaward half of the house does the opposite. The living floor pushes out onto a deck that stands on piles above the water, its edge curved so the rail follows the shoreline rather than cutting across it, and the upper volume cantilevers over that deck to shade it. Living room and bedroom both open directly onto it. On a parcel like this the structure, the coastal engineering and the approvals are one problem rather than three, and they are resolved before the elevation is drawn.
On the water
