A 1954 commission on Malibu Road
The archive of Craig Ellwood's built work carries one line for this address: Frank and Polly Pierson House #1, 1954, 24554 Malibu Road, Malibu. The Los Angeles County record agrees on the year. Three bedrooms, two baths, 1,471 square feet, one floor, on a lot that ends in sand.
The listing calls it an Ellwood. The record calls it something more specific. It is the first of two houses Ellwood designed for the same couple, and it is the one that is still here.
The client came back, and then lost the second house
Nine years after this house was finished, the Piersons hired Ellwood again. House #2 went up in 1963 at 32320 Pacific Coast Highway, and Ellwood returned in 1970 to add a pool and a guest house. It was sold in 1976 and destroyed by fire in the 1978 coastal firestorm.
Two commissions from one client is the strongest thing a client can say about an architect. Only one of the two is standing.
The architect who never held a licence
He was born Jon Nelson Burke in Clarendon, Texas, in 1922. The name Craig Ellwood dates to 1946 and a construction company; it came off a liquor store near his first office. He never sat for an architecture licence. Licensed partners produced the technical drawings and the sign-off, and Ellwood brought the commissions and the design.
By 1954 he had already done Case Study House 16 and was at work on 17. He kept building in Los Angeles until the mid-seventies, then moved to Pergine Valdarno in Tuscany to paint, and died there in 1992.
What the plan does
Everything is spent on the ocean elevation. Living, dining and kitchen open into a single room along the water wall and run straight out to a deck a few steps above the sand. The primary bedroom takes the ocean view and has its own door onto the same deck. Two further bedrooms sit behind and share a bath. A separate bonus room stands apart from the rest of the plan and takes a media room, an office or a gym.
A few lots east, at 24514 Malibu Road, is Ellwood's Hunt House of 1957, an Architectural Record House of the Year in 1959, nearly demolished in 2013 and restored from 2018. This house is three years earlier, lower, and smaller in ambition. It was built to be lived in on the sand rather than photographed above it.
Availability
The house is available now, offered for lease. The owner will write the term by the year, for longer than a year, or by the season, and terms are negotiated with the listing agents at Sotheby's International Realty in Malibu.
A restoration in 2006, designed by Julie Hart and carried out by Citizen Properties, finished the open decks in the same color as the interior floors so that inside and outside read as one surface. That is the condition the house is offered in.
