“I wanted the house to have the look of a giant wave at the peak of its strength,” said surfer-architect Harry Gesner.
A couple of years back, we lost a real gem when the surfer-architect and epic swordsman Harry Gesner got put in the dirt just three orbits short of his centenary.
They sure don’t make ‘em like Harry Gesner anymore, this former GI who stormed the beach at Normandy in 1944, constantly scudding along the precipice of death without quite tipping into the void, unlike innumerable pals.
Last year, Harry 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), and which was owned at one point by electro-haired singer Rod Stewart, famous for pairing pink singlets beneath a suit blazer, went on the market for $49.5 million.
A bullish short price, sure, but the place is beyond epic. It wasn’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 missed in lavish you got in soul.
From a terrific profile on Harry Gesner in The Surfer’s 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.
The house’s former owner Rod Stewart, who turns eighty in January. is currently embroiled in a marriage “stalemate” after refusing a $74 million offer on his current residence, a modest palace in Los Angeles Ladera Heights, colloquially knowns as the “Black Beverly Hills”.
