World’s most famous beach house designed by surfer-architect Harry Gesner and the secret inspiration for Sydney Opera House lists for almost $50 million!

"I wanted the house to have the look of a giant wave at the peak of its strength"

Last year, Harry Gesner, the surfer-architect and epic swordsman whose blade was rarely in its sheath, died just three orbits short of his centenary.

They sure don’t make ‘em like Haz anymore, a former GI who stormed the beach at Normandy in 1944. In a short but very good profile published in The Surfers Journal called Wild at Heart Haz recalled D-Day.

“They put us in a boat and just loaded us with equipment—backpacks, eating equipment, sleeping blanket, all this stuff,” he said. “Then they sent the boat to the shore. Nobody knew what they were doing,” he says, looking pensive. “It was just terrible.”

As the boat approached the beach, Harry watched as the soldiers in front of him were blown to bits by enemy fire. Those who weren’t tried to jump overboard but quickly drowned under the weight of their backpacks. “I knew I’d die if I didn’t get all that stuff off me,” he said. Harry stripped off his gear and dove into the ocean before the boat blew up. “If I hadn’t surfed my whole life, there would have been no way I would have made it.”

(I suggest you click here to feel the legend of Gesner.)

Anyway, Gesner’s Wave House in Malibu, which was built in 1957 and occasionally listed as an inspiration for the Sydney Opera House (Danish architect Jørn Utzon’s design for the iconic Sydney harbour build was submitted in 1957 and he later called Gesner to congratulate him on the joint) has come onto the market for $49.5 million.

It ain’t in the same price league as the two-hundred mill Beyonce and Jay-Z spent on their “cement monolith, designed by architect master Tadao Ando, home right up from First Point” but what you miss in lavish you get in soul. 

Again, from the Journal,

To get to the “soul of the site,” he’d surf the breaks in front of beachfront properties he was designing, giving him a perspective on the landscape and the area’s relationship with the ocean. During one of these “soul sessions” in northern Malibu in 1956, he sketched a design for a particularly wild and jazzy house with a grease pencil on the deck of his board. The result was his most celebrated creation, the world-famous Cooper Wave House built in 1957… The Cooper House especially pulls from an eclectic patchwork of design hooks—the buttressed beam framing of Notre Dame; Richard Neutra’s blurring of indoor and outdoor space; the fluid and refined lines of Frank Lloyd Wright; the space-age, B-movie psychedelia of Barbarella. Harry credits his style to a lack of formal training and to the improvisational skills he developed surfing. “I’m not sure my way of self education is the best for everyone,” he told me in 2007. “But I guess it speaks to originality and individuality.”

Six beds, seven bathrooms, 6208 square feet built right there on the sand on Malibu.

“I wanted the house to have the look of a giant wave at the peak of its strength,” Gesner said.

If fifty mill is a little too rich, down-shift to Gesner’s Sandcastle House right next door for $27.5 million. Just as pretty, save twenty-ish mill. 

Or buy both! 

Tell ’em your pals at BeachGrit sent ya.