Tour a Malibu Beach House With Interiors Inspired by the Walt Disney Concert Hall
From launching and supporting clothing brands to traveling the world, Los Angeles fashion executives Tony Graham and Dierdre Roffoni have seemingly done it all. Yet one milestone—owning a second home—was not even on the visionary couple’s radar until a lark that took place in the mid-2010s.
“We had friends with a place in Malibu who invited us to come out [to stay] after a business trip, and I remember feeling so relaxed that I said to Tony, ‘Wow, maybe we should consider this,’” recalls Roffoni. “‘This feels like a break from real life.’” The anomalous experience also softened her perception of Malibu, which she had previously likened to “LA on the beach.” Soon, she and Graham began looking at listings in the area at a leisurely pace.
“It was nothing serious,” Graham says of the initial search. Then, another chance encounter: “We were at a wedding and this acquaintance of ours who lives in Malibu told us about a house that had just come up for sale, and that we’d love it.” The Saturday conversation propelled Graham to book a tour of the oceanfront residence for Monday, at which “I walked out of the living room and onto the beach, which is not something I do often, and I had this amazing feeling of freedom and openness.” On that same day in 2018, he and Roffoni made an offer on the post-and-beam building.
Architect David Montalba, namesake of the Los Angeles– and Lausanne, Switzerland–based studio, and Matt Blacke founder Cliff Fong were among the first people with whom the couple shared news of the offer’s acceptance. Both designers had worked with Graham and Roffoni on previous projects, and Fong’s friendship with the pair dates to his arrival in Los Angeles in his late teens. “My dad used to say that water seeks its own level,” Roffoni says of inviting Fong and Montalba to collaborate once again, this time to turn their Malibu purchase into an easy, unpretentious space “that’s synonymous with who we are.”
Montalba was delighted by the opportunity to strip the house to its structure and create a respite that would fit his pals like a glove. “They’re really thoughtful people who appreciate design, and who understand that ideas and executing those ideas takes complexity and time,” says the architect, pointing to 15 rounds of wood samples as an example of the homeowners’ patience. “Their appreciation and willingness to support the process inspires us, and you wish projects like these never end.”
The architect notes feeling equally thrilled by the site. “We’ve been fortunate to do a lot of homes in Malibu, but there are few better lots in terms of view,” Montalba says, explaining that the only neighbor to the property’s south is a rugged, cypress-studded ridge. “You feel like you have a private beach in LA.”
Reverence for the landscape drove the collaborators to finish Montalba’s tiered volume in shou sugi ban, “so the building didn’t stick out from the hillside,” as Graham puts it. The client was further interested in cladding the interior entirely in Douglas fir, to emulate the Walt Disney Concert Hall “and provide this real beach colony atmosphere against the dark exterior wood.” So began the many mockups that yielded oiled and wire-brushed fir planks for the floors and ceilings, with corresponding millwork in more durable rift white oak.
To underscore the night-and-day difference between exterior and interior, Montalba says he conceived a compressed entry experience by angling the house so that it would meet the steep hillside at an almost-triangular point. “You go through this tight experience that’s dark and compacted, and then it really opens up as you step in,” he says of the front door. Architectural elements of the first floor, like height changes and the location of the living area’s fireplace, prevent entrants from walking head-on into an ocean panorama. The framed views are repeated upstairs, thanks to careful placement of the primary suite’s bed as well as its shower bench, about which Montalba explains, “We create more transition between the world you’ve left behind and this place of respite and tranquility.”
Of the peaceful atmosphere, Roffoni says of Montalba and her husband, “If it was up to these guys, this would be the most minimal, pristine home.” She saw herself and Fong as filling in some of the interior’s negative spaces: “Cliff and I came in to warm things up.”
Fong also had parity on the mind, as the multihyphenate sought out welcoming furnishings that also embodied sophisticated design. “We shared the idea of this home where everybody could crash on the weekends and decompress,” Fong says. “And while people hear beach house and think of an overstuffed slipcovered sofa and a driftwood coffee table, that’s neither Tony nor Dierdre.” In another example of embracing process, the merry band of creatives undertook an unusual amount of test-driving in furniture showrooms, while layering in existing pieces as well as Roffoni’s flea-market treasures.
“Style isn’t buying everything off a showroom floor; it’s in the balance between high and low where style has its greatest moment of expression,” says Fong, who adds that several organic forms as well as an interior palette of pale beiges, grays, and blues were meant to achieve harmony with nature. The designers certainly got their outcome. As Graham concludes, “It still surprises me every morning to experience the cypresses when I wake up, and the movement of light over the landscape and into the house just hugely impacts the quality of life.”
1/16Montalba angled the house to its hillside site, to create compression at its front door. That sensation is most palpable just beyond the entry gate, where a retaining wall just brushes past the building volume. The lounge chair and planters are by Mathieu Mategot and David Cressey, respectively.
Art: Joe Goode/Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles2/16Using interior stairs and changes to the ceiling plane, the entry opens into the living space. “As it relates to transitioning from outdoors to indoors, a lot of our work concerns reflections of natural light and texture,” Montalba explains.
3/16The fireplace was another subject of numerous mockups, to ensure the just-right placement of its component stones. It is deliberately placed to partly shield the Pacific Ocean view, and to engender a feeling of enclosure. “It’s a pivotal point of the downstairs area and creates a lot of visual warmth,” Roffoni says. The fireplace faces Arflex’s Marenco Sofa and a coffee table by Michael Wilson.
4/16The first-floor living area flows seamlessly into a dining area, where a 19th-century French pine dining table is surrounded by Pierre Jeanneret Chandigarh chairs that, Fong says, Graham had been saving in storage.
5/16The southwestern corner of the first-floor balcony reaches toward Malibu’s Point Dume promontory.
Art: Marco Antonio6/16The kitchen traces the northern edge of the first floor; the frosted window harvests daylight without disclosing activity to the neighboring home. Vintage leather-and-chrome counter stools selected by Charlotte Perriand for Les Arcs ski resort find a new home at a rift white oak kitchen island by DPC Millwork topped in Walker Zanger’s Calacatta Vagli.
7/16In the rift white-oak-wrapped powder room, a vintage Wilhelm Wagenfeld sconce crowns a Kobenhavens Mobelsnedkeri pivot mirror and a customized JP Column sink by Cocoon.
Art: © The Estate of Al Taylor/David Zwirner8/16“We wanted a transition to the upstairs, so we folded a bookcase around the bookcase to frame an atrium with clerestories that lets wind scoop through the house,” Montalba says of the staircase, adding that “this amazing millwork holds all the family elements within the home.”
Art: Serge Attukwei Clottey9/16Shou sugi ban fins envelop the house, to serve as a rainscreen. The vertical elements are mounted to the building in various rotations, as Montalba explains, “to reflect one’s experience of the site.” An artwork by Serge Attukwei Clottey is a centerpiece of the primary bedroom; the sculpture is from Francois Weiss’s Ash Birch Stone series.
10/16In the sparingly composed primary bedroom, a console in sandblasted ash with leather panels faces a custom bed in rift white oak designed by Montalba Architects. “Negative space is how you appreciate the sculptural quality of a piece of furniture, and how you understand the relationships between things,” designer Cliff Fong says of the interiors. The pale pink shag rug is a silk covering from Woven.
11/16Upstairs in the primary suite, the passageway between the bedroom and bath area does triple duty as a walk-in closet and south-facing workspace; the latter features Poul Kjaerholm’s PK9 chair nestled within a custom claro walnut desk by Berkeley Mills.
12/16“If you’re doing a beachfront home, usually you’d face the tub toward the water,” says architect David Montalba, but thanks to this project’s poetic site and its sensitive clients, “here we could show respect for the landscape and ocean.”
13/16The primary bath is clad largely in Brechia Di Nola fabricated by Hullebusch. Montalba says he approached the stone shower bench more as an object in nature, rather than a partition between zones. A Kuro Stool by Studio Cober sits at the vanity.
Art: Hugh Holland14/16In a guest room, one of Hugh Holland’s evocative skateboarder portraits overlooks an Arka chair by Yngve Ekstrom as well as a vintage Noguchi floor lamp. “Although our primary residence is bigger, David’s design created more space for art here than I thought was possible,” Roffoni says.
15/16Tony Graham and Dierdre Roffoni’s Malibu residence, as seen from a secluded stretch of beach to its south.
16/16While the home measures under 3,000 square feet, multiple outdoor rooms provide additional usable space and blur the boundaries between architecture and coastal environment.
