Shapiro designed several places for repose, including this terrace. 200-year-old cypress trees hug the path leading down to Broad Beach.

Antiques impresario Richard Shapiro’s refined Mediterranean villa rising above Broad Beach is a timeless blend of old and new

BY DIANE DORRANS SAEKS

PHOTOGRAPHED BY LISA ROMEREIN

Richard Shapiro.

Richard Shapiro wasn’t looking for a new abode when he set off to view a property for sale on Malibu’s Broad Beach. He was perfectly happy at his Holmby Hills residence, running his worldy empire of curation and design in town (Studiolo collection, 8905 boutique, and Richard Shapiro Antiques), and fashioning gardens and residences for clients.

“I went on a lark,” recalls Shapiro. “I stepped inside the front gate, saw the view and discovered total seclusion. I was smitten. Within 30 minutes I knew exactly the house I would build here.”

In the living room, 20-foot steel windows frame a Malibu ocean view.

Three years later, he stands in the ethereal, light-filled living room overlooking the ocean. The retreat provides a year-round escape—a fantasy with the feeling of a Mediterranean hideaway.

On the edge of the bluff, a pair of handsome 200-year-old Monterey cypresses frame the view. Steps lead down to a peaceful stretch of coast. Pelicans in formation hover and swoop, and silvery whales bask in kelp beds just off shore.

“I originally planned it as a weekend house, but I’ve found I’m spending more and more time here,” says Shapiro. “Friends drive up from Los Angeles. We have drinks and watch the sunset, and we enjoy dinner on the terrace with a big fire on cool evenings.”

The villa is so polished, so perfectly at home on this site that it’s hard to imagine Shapiro’s land originally included a roofless, windowless tumbledown shack in a tangle of vines. After acquiring the 40×200-foot lot, he devised a way to build on the footprint of the extant dwelling.

The Morrocan-style courtyard with tiles from Marrakech.

The dining area’s powder-coated table is by MDF Italia. Chairs from Cost Plus World Market were painted marine blue.

An arched doorway leads from the study to the garden.

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“I loved that I’d be starting from scratch, creating whatever I wanted,” Shapiro explains. “Tall hedges and bougainvillea disguised the neighboring houses so nothing would intrude on my concept.”

For many years, his extensive travels throughout Europe in search of antiques and inspiration included visiting and exploring historic châteaux and Renaissance villas. He admired the patina of age on palaces in Sicily and wanted to replicate that sweet, ruined ambiance.

Shapiro selected honed basalt for the kitchen’s island and back wall.

Shapiro’s “collector’s cabinet” study is a refuge with prized archival North African photography, an 18th-century Spanish desk and a sandstone-and-slate floor. The fireplace is from Cyprus.

A plastered hemispherical niche with a custom-designed curved sofa.

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Shapiro added a new guest suite at the back of the house, and in the process crafted a sunny courtyard with an old stone fountain and the graphic punch of bright turquoise and white Moroccan floor tiles set in a zig-zag pattern. Bougainvillea spills over the crenellated walls, and clipped box spheres in terra cotta pots jostle with rain-washed Provençal troughs and an elegant, attenuated urn. The sea air and sibilant surf sounds complete the age-old Sicilian atmosphere.

Boxwood, a favorite of the designer, in the courtyard, with bougainvillea, orange trees, Boston ivy and jasmine.

With a simple, open plan, he commissioned steel windows and doors for their slender grace and resistance to winter storms. As the double-frame domicile began to take shape, Shapiro worked with a team of plaster specialists from Ireland, led by Ian Hardwick, to stain, buff, scrub and rough up the ivory-colored walls. The effect makes them appear as if they’d been there for hundreds of years (“worn and weathered,” he says). Faded frescoes by Ilia Anossov add a 15th-century-style touch.

“This house is a folly designed to look like an ancient building I could have found hidden beneath the undergrowth for centuries on this remote bluff,” says Shapiro.

“I planned the interiors to look old, too. I’ve always been attracted to antiquity and want to live in another time.”

He designed the sleek steel balustrade, painted gunmetal gray.

Most brilliantly, Shapiro, a longtime collector of high-profile contemporary art, juxtaposed his antiques and taupe sandstone slab floors (cut into 16-inch squares with edges chipped off for patina) against the crisp cubist outlines of linen-covered L’Aventura by Studiolo chairs in the living room. A sinuous, modern steel stairway balustrade crafted by metal artist Glenn Fischer and designed by Shapiro curves past the ceiling beams.

After more than 18 months of painstaking construction, Shapiro has created a dream life for himself. At Broad Beach, his perfect morning begins with an early walk on the sand, admiring sculptural rocks unearthed by the tide and spying cormorants and herons overhead.

“On a summer day, friends arrive, and lunch lingers on until the evening,” he says. “We sit outside listening to the waves; the moon rises; constellations are bright. There is nowhere else I’d rather be.”
[C, Summer 2012]

The marble torso in the dining area is fourth-century Roman.

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Tagged in: 8905 boutique, Broad Beach, Glenn Fischer, Ian Hardwick, Ilia Anossov, L’Aventura by Studiolo, Malibu, Richard Shapiro, Richard Shapiro Antiques, Studiolo collection