It’s the strangest thing: You can see the ocean. There it is, lapping up against the beaches—Big Rock, La Costa, Carbon—that border the Pacific Coast Highway, flashes of roiling blue in the gaps where the homes of millionaires, billionaires, and Jeff Bridges used to be.
Eight months after the fires that ripped through 24,000 acres of Southern California, the Malibu coastline is missing lots of teeth. Tidy dirt lots interrupt rows of palatial—if a little smoke-scarred—houses. Many of them are now decorated with for sale signs. One 6,200-square-foot lot directly on Las Flores Beach is on the market for just $2.75 million. And under current guidelines, owners can rebuild up to 10 percent larger than the previous structures. Can you say “investment opportunity”?
The fires destroyed more than 1,000 homes and 99 Malibu businesses (and damaged 243 more). Much of the debris has been cleared, some of it hauled to the recycling centers that have sprung up at Will Rogers State Historic Park, in nearby Pacific Palisades.
In most cases, construction won’t begin for months—at a minimum—as residents and architects contend with a permitting backlog that is probably keeping Malibu’s handful of bureaucrats up all night. “Much of the new construction that we see now is from previously permitted projects that were in progress or recently completed at the time of the fire,” says Geoffrey von Oeyen, a local architect.
There will be more fires—and the toxic by-products of the last ones are forever floating around—but a lot of dreamers will still want in. And for the outsiders who sort of know and wholeheartedly love Malibu, it’s a good time to commit. In its vulnerable state, it’s revealing itself in all sorts of new ways.
Why do we love it so? Blame the movies, the songs, the tabloids. But to be fair, for a town of just 10,300 souls, Malibu has an awfully big personality. It’s the birthplace of Kaia Gerber, the $33 smoothy (the “Billion Dollar” flavor at SunLife Organics, with raw cashew butter and cow’s-milk colostrum), and everyone’s favorite Barbie.
And, miraculously, some of it remains exactly as it was. The stretch of Carbon Beach occupied by the Malibu Beach Inn, for one. This hotel’s oceanfront restaurant has long been an unofficial Hollywood clubhouse, but that’s one of the reasons it’s such fun for those who check in and stay a while. Its 47 glass-walled guest rooms have uninterrupted views of the sea, and their minimalist interiors have overstuffed mattresses, linens that may have been stolen from an Italian count, and a nifty pair of earplugs, which you’ll probably need if you find ocean sounds kind of annoying. (Guilty.)
Wake at dawn, relish the soothing rhythms of the Toto toilet, page an attendant for a cappuccino, and admire the glow of sunrise over the Pacific. It’s as close as you will ever get to living like Leonardo DiCaprio, so you may as well enjoy it.
For visitors and locals alike, the day might formally begin with a sugar-free vanilla latte at the Alfred Coffee at the Malibu Country Mart, the most enjoyable mall in the country ever since it opened, in 1975. Judging by this crowd, one would never know that this is a community in some form of distress. Even as perma-young soccer moms swoop up slouchy yoga pants at nearby Vuori, Malibu Shaman still does a respectable business in psychic readings and books such as 365 Ways to Raise Your Frequency.
But according to Heather Taylor, a local housewares designer, Point Dume is the best place to take it all in (preferably followed by peanut-butter fro-yo at Malibu Yogurt & Ice Cream). The bluff on Malibu’s western border is, like almost everything else in Malibu, covered in some extremely attractive real estate, but at its tip, there’s a tiny national park with views all the way to the Santa Monica Pier. This is the point at which the non-Californians will start to reimagine their lives as hideously rich screenwriters with a little place in the Malibu Colony who are regulars on the Zuma and El Matador beaches, as opposed to the Sunset Tower Hotel and the San Vicente Bungalows. Natural disasters aside, the worst thing about living in Malibu is the drama of driving to Los Angeles.
But these days, even that’s not so bad. On the P.C.H., the speed limit has been lowered to 25 miles per hour to make life a little bit safer for the construction workers on either side. So slow down. Take another look. Drop in to Zuma Jay’s, a board-rental and T-shirt shop owned and operated by local surf legend (and former two-time mayor of Malibu) Jefferson Wagner. His $50 sweatshirts will earn you a lot more respect than the $200 ones hawked at nearby Aviator Nation. (Those will make a perfect gift for your teenage niece.)
Don’t even think about leaving town without visiting the Eames House, an architectural masterpiece on a sleepy street in the Pacific Palisades built by the industrial designers Charles and Ray Eames in 1949. Its neighbors are much more modern affairs, but tucked behind its gate, the house exists almost identically as Ray Eames left it when she died, in 1988.
Until recently, only those architecture buffs who dared to pull up and knock on the door were indulged with an impromptu walkabout with executive director Adrienne Luce, who works with her team on the premises.
But as of last week, the house is finally open for exterior self-guided tours. Peeking through the windows and admiring the Eameses’ quirky mix of folk art, seashells, abstract paintings, and Indian rugs—and to think they went on to make a fortune in office furniture!—it brings to mind a sort of permanence, an implication that even with all this change, much good will abide.
If Malibu can make a $33 smoothy into what The Wall Street Journal called “the drink of the summer,” it can do just about anything.
Ashley Baker is a Deputy Editor at AIR MAIL and a co-host of the Morning Meeting podcast
