Project material
- Category
- International
- Typology
- International
- Year
- 2025
- Location
- Internacional
- City
- Malibu, California
- Status
- Portfolio
Interiors under the roof, in Malibu
PCH occupies the second floor of an existing house on the Pacific Coast Highway, in Malibu, California, where the road runs between the ocean and the dry coastal mountains. The brief was not to build anew: it was to remake from within a floor already standing, with its structure and its pitched roof as the point of departure.
The roof orders the interior. The pale timber beams are left exposed and set the rhythm of the space, and a skylight brings light to the center of the floor, where no window reaches. The kitchen is resolved around a long stone island, with the pale wood cabinetry kept low so the windows stay clear and frame the hills.
The project is developed alongside ONE:ONE Designs, in Los Angeles, with 57 Architecture as the extended team: a BIM model of the existing conditions, demolition and proposal drawings, layout options and interior visualizations for the permit process.
From the existing conditions to the proposal
Here the sketch does not begin on an empty lot but in what is already built: first the existing conditions of the second floor were modeled in BIM, and the demolition and the proposal were drawn over that model. With the floor cleared, the team tested layout options and carried them into interior visualizations to discuss with ONE:ONE Designs and to support the permit, so that every design decision was made knowing which wall was going and which was staying.
