Carbon Beach House Malibu

Some might say – don’t tamper with a John Lautner house, but the new owner, a longtime, passionate swimmer, wanted to add an indoor pool to this classic modernist beach home. Thus began a significant addition and interior remodel project where the great challenge lay in balancing client goals with the spirit of the original architect’s creation.

Throughout the house, we worked around Lautner’s avant-garde engineering and sculptural applications of wood and concrete to carefully repurpose spaces to suit the client’s needs. Our changes included a new media room, enlarged bedrooms, home office, and chef’s kitchen.

We replaced an awkward 1990’s addition, incongruent with the original Lautner residence, with a new indoor swimming pool that was designed to be largely indistinguishable to Lautner’s building. The new state-of-the-art, wake-free lap-pool is surrounded by retractable glazing which lets in natural light, and the ocean’s smells and sounds, blurring the boundaries between sea, house, and sky.

“The real catalyst for redoing the home was Jamie’s desire to have a 25-meter indoor pool,” explains architect Michael Kovac of Los Angeles–based Kovac Design Studio, the firm entrusted with the commission. “She is a passionate swimmer, and the original pool was really more of a beautiful water feature than a place to do laps.”

To carve out sufficient space for the amenity, Kovac and McCourt decided to remove an awkward two-story bedroom addition that had been built at the front of the house sometime in the ’90s. The new concrete pool is sympathetic to the original architecture, to the point of being largely indistinguishable—its vaulted timber ceiling mirrors that of the adjacent living room, and the panel of glass that separates the two spaces echoes the curtain-wall details of the dwelling’s oceanside façade."

Mayer Rus, "A John Lautner Beach House in Malibu Is Revitalized", Architectural Digest

“The trees, the boulders, the water—they keep me grounded. You look out at the ocean and hear the waves, and you understand your own insignificance in a bigger world.”

Jamie McCourt, Client, "A John Lautner Beach House in Malibu Is Revitalized", Architectural Digest