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LOS
ANGELES—Turn off the road, pass through blank-faced
gates and the house rises at the end of a drive— an
angular blank canvas silhouetted against the sky.
Through an aperture in all that whiteness—actually a
pair of mammoth glass doors, perfectly aligned at the
home’s front and back—the sun dances on the Pacific
Ocean, boats bob on the horizon and Santa Catalina
Island comes into focus. Only then does realization
strikes: You are at land’s end. That is the first
surprise at the house of the Arnoldis—author
Katie and artist Charles, who designed it after getting
a bit of advice from a friend named Gehry.
“I
approached the design as if I were making a sculpture,”
Charles says. “For me, architecture is the same process
as making art. You create a problem for yourself that
you have to solve. I’m visually oriented. The shape and
scale of the house and of the rooms reflect my point of
view. They’re big, bold and straightforward.”
Inside,
every room has a glass wall facing the water.
CHARLES ARNOLDI plays in
the backyard of his home in Malibu, California, with
English bulldog Ruby. -- PHOTO
BY RICARDO DEARATANHA
The
living room, 35 feet wide by 40 feet long, has an
immense hearth and those sliding glass doors, 25 feet
wide. Even with its 20-foot ceiling and concrete floor,
the room feels cozy, the combined effect of the
seductively plump red leather sofa and chairs that
Charles designed and the paintings that animate both
walls.
Round
end tables, reminiscent of antiques, are actually
contemporary steel creations of Charles’s. The artist
designed almost every piece of furniture in the house,
he says, with the exception of a Noguchi coffee table in
the living room and the bentwood Thonet chairs around
the Arnoldi-designed aluminum dining table, which has a
small Calder sculpture in its center.
A large
leaping fish made of milky glass scales sits on a
pedestal. Is it a sculpture? No, it’s a lamp by Frank
Gehry. The bulbs are concealed inside.
Gehry’s
drawings and sculptures are all over the house, along
with art by the Arnoldis’ daughter, Natalie. The
high-school senior’s works keep company with those of
Sam Francis, Robert Graham, Richard Diebenkorn, Jasper
Johns and Francesco Clemente, to name a few.
Charles’s artwork is in the collections of Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, the Norton Simon in
Pasadena and
New York’s
Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art, but it’s
rather scantily represented in his home.
In fact,
the evolution of his art—from early branch and twig
assemblages, chain-saw paintings and other woodwork
(some currently on view at Pepperdine University)
through the diverse styles in sculpture and painting
that he’s embraced over the years—can barely be
glimpsed. He estimates that only one-quarter of the
pieces in the house are his own.
What’s
there is riveting. An older black-and-white abstract
above the fireplace is an homage to Rosie, a beloved
deceased family dog; on the opposite wall is one of
Charles’s newest works, a geometric patchwork of
brilliant colors.
Planted
indoors and out are his 1990s potato sculptures, oddly
comforting clusters of organic shapes that a writer in
Artnews called “as pleasing as a Buddha’s belly.”
The
stark simplicity of the house, built 24 years ago atop a
cliff overlooking a prized surfing spot, might be called
a beacon of architectural sanity in this increasingly
glitzed-up area of West Malibu. The design’s strength,
Santa Monica artist and friend Peter Alexander says, is
that it takes beautiful advantage of its site.
“Our
house isn’t fancy,” Katie says.
She
remembers when the neighborhood was mostly rural and
blue collar, and almost all sports and social activities
were focused on the beach. Nowadays, newcomers from the
city are demanding street lights and sidewalks, she
says, trying to create the urban jungle from which they
fled.
Artist
Laddie John Dill, another friend of the Arnoldis, says
he’s “always struck by the simplicity and transparency
of the house.”
“I like
that when you pull up, you can see right through it to
that world-class view,” Dill says. “But when you’re
inside, it feels very private. I like the way he’s made
the horizon line very much a part of the architecture
itself.”
Katie,
49, has been surfing here since she was a child. Her
father, Richard Lee Anawalt, the late owner of Anawalt
Lumber, bought a small cottage and three acres of land
for $39,000. Charles, 61, took up surfing 15 years ago,
so he could enjoy the sport with his wife and kids.
Both the
Arnoldi children grew up on this beach, surfing and
snorkeling with their parents and friends. The history
of their family is written on this cliff and in this
house. He was 34 and she was 21 when they met. He was
already famous; she was an art history major who had
studied his work in college.
“Chuck
was traveling a lot in those days for shows all over the
world,” says Katie, whose first novel, Chemical Pink,
was a 2001 bestseller and whose second, The Wentworths,
hit bookstores in March.
“I was
traveling with him so often that it was impossible to
dig into a career. I loved him, but I wasn’t willing to
follow him around unless we committed to making a future
together.”
So when
she turned 22, she proposed marriage, knowing he might
not say yes.
“He came
from a very troubled background,” she says, “and the
idea of family just didn’t fit into his plan.”
She
remembers Charles sitting on the couch in his Venice
studio, tears streaming down his cheeks. He said he
needed to ask his best friends, Frank and Berta Gehry,
what he should do. So Katie stayed put while Charles
drove to the Gehrys’, where he was advised to take the
plunge.
“We’ve
been married 26 years in June,” Katie says, “and we
often spend the anniversary with them.”
Katie
and her older brother shared a building permit for the
Malibu land, so when he wanted to start construction,
the newlywed Arnoldis decided to erect something, too.
“I was a
bit confused about what to build,” says Charles, who
consulted Gehry. “Frank said: If you don’t know what to
do, just build a big box. So I did.”
He
chuckles at the self-serving floor plan he came up
with—one that consisted of mostly work space for him and
ignored the possibility of children.
“It was
a 4,800-square-foot one-bedroom, one-bath house,” he
says.
The huge
living room has a kitchen and dining room off to one
side, with stairs at opposite ends. One stairway leads
up to the master suite, which overlooks the water and,
through a massive swiveling window, the living room
below. Another set of steps leads up to what had been a
huge loft space that Charles envisioned as a studio for
himself.
The
greatness of his vision, Katie says, is that the design
turned out to be ideal in size and concept for the
growing family her husband could not foresee.
“When
our children needed bedrooms, bye-bye went Chuck’s
potential loft,” she says.
The
upstairs was converted into two kids’ bedrooms with a
bath in between.
Today
Charles works six days a week at the Venice studio
compound he has owned for years. Katie, who says she
can’t work at home because the ocean view is too
distracting, writes from a shared Santa Monica space
called theOffice, which her kids jokingly refer to as
adult day care.
After
work, however, the family unwinds in Malibu at what is
truly a beach house—casual, comfortable and impervious
to anything the dogs and kids (now 17 and 19) might
track in. The home’s original hand-troweled concrete
floors—popular now, but less common when Charles first
installed them—have never needed refinishing. The
inch-thick pieces of black rubber on the stairs have
endured.
The
Arnoldis’ artistic inspiration carried over into the
garden, according to landscape designer Maureen Barnes.
The area fronting the ocean used to have grass, but has
been redesigned to resemble a minimalist sculpture
installation, with a floor of pale gravel and cactuses
arranged to look like they’re blowing in the wind.
“They
both knew exactly what they wanted,” Barnes says. “Chuck
had a full-blown vision of it in his head. I didn’t
really have to design a thing.” |
