Harry Gesner’s Buildings “Surf” the California Hillsides

A surfable ocean wave typically lasts from five to 20 seconds. Architect and surfer Harry Gesner (1925–2022) attempted to capture this fleeting sculptural form by building monuments to it that might well be remembered forever.

Gesner’s homes have long inspired awe from architecture buffs for their eagle-beak curves, ship-prow points, and illusions of riding or emerging from the terrain. While a few of his 100 or so buildings have succumbed to wildfires over the years, most, including the Scantlin House, on the Getty Center’s property, still pepper the canyons, cliffs, and beaches of Southern California, Gesner’s stomping ground. His structures seem kinetic, alive and evolving with the flora and fauna around them, as though they were majestic trees, birds, or even sandcastles.

“Harry Gesner championed the development of a distinctly Southern Californian modern architectural language, bending forms to accommodate steep lots and to capture the feeling of sky and sea,” says Gary Riichirō Fox, assistant curator of architecture at the Getty Research Institute. “The Institute is committed to processing the Harry Gesner archive, which contains his architectural plans, sketches, and photographs. It’s a critical aspect of helping steward his legacy so future generations can analyze Harry’s work.”

To best understand the motivation of this maverick, it’s essential to travel back to another, much more distant shore at a darker moment in history: the beaches of Normandy during World War II.

Surviving a near-death experience

In surfing, when a strong enough wind hits the water, the force can travel thousands of miles to form powerful groundswells. Groundswells form into massive waves that surfers love to ride.

One might say that Gesner had a groundswell powering his life, starting with his birth in Oxnard on the Pacific’s edge to a childhood led by an adventurous father who surfed with “Duke” Kahanamoku and traveled through remote parts of South America. Gesner’s artist mother sketched right next to him from an early age. Growing up, Gesner carved waves in Malibu and Santa Monica and skied on Mammoth Mountain.

But then World War II broke out, and Gesner enlisted in the military. At 18, he found himself in a landing craft bound for France’s Omaha Beach on D-Day, when it was hit by enemy fire. Gesner survived by removing his gear and diving into the ocean before the vessel blew up. “If I hadn’t surfed my whole life, there would have been no way I would have made it,” Gesner told the Surfer’s Journal.

A few months later, near Cologne, Germany, he almost lost both legs when a German Panzer tank shelling pinned him under rubble. When Allied forces pulled him out a day or so later, both limbs were injured, frostbitten, and gangrene had set in. His doctors prepared for amputation. Gesner convinced them that if he massaged olive oil onto his legs every day, he would generate blood flow. The plan, combined with a new drug, penicillin, miraculously worked, and he fully recovered.

Gesner was discharged to New York City with a Purple Heart, but an epiphany that had struck in a foxhole haunted him: “I made up my mind that if I somehow survived this insanity and destruction of humanity, I would do something with my life,” he told Lisa Germany, author of Houses of the Sundown Sea, a book about Gesner’s life and work. “I would design houses, buildings, I would build with my own hands the things I designed,” he said.

First, Gesner dipped a toe into the ocean of academia by auditing an architecture class at Yale University. There, he was invited by Frank Lloyd Wright to design at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona. Gesner turned Wright down—he always wanted to develop his own style without strong outside influence, according to Gesner’s son, actor Zen Gesner. Instead, he zigged by taking psychology classes (to better understand clients), then zagged by traveling to the Ecuadorian wilderness to search for pre-Columbian artifacts. “I think Ecuador was how he dealt with his PTSD,” says Zen, who lives in Malibu near Sandcastle, the 1974 home Gesner built that Zen grew up in.

After Ecuador, the Pacific Ocean called Gesner back to his roots. Just before the surf boom of the 1950s, he settled in Southern California and gave himself 10 years to “make it” as an architect.

An organic, hands-on ethos

California’s modernist movement was more freestyling than its international counterparts—a perfect milieu for a self-taught architect. From 1945 to 1950, Gesner learned the craft of construction alongside bricklayers, carpenters, and masons, experimenting with adobe, unexpected forms (like the jagged Inez Northrop House in Santa Barbara [no longer in existence]), and flying buttresses (gleaned from his time walking through European cities during the war).

He also began a lifelong practice of camping out on sites before building on them, sketching and studying all aspects of the land, including sunlight, wind, vegetation, water, and firmness of the terrain. He built each structure in dialogue with—and deference to—the environment, almost as if the house had grown from roots within the earth itself.

An early example would endure as one of his most famous: the Wave House of 1959, built for William Gerritt Cooper, whose family owned Cooper Lumber in Los Angeles. Gesner paddled into the ocean near the site and drew the initial plans on a surfboard with a grease pen. “The Wave House faces the incoming waves head on, matching their tone, and, well, also respecting their power,” says Germany. “There is nothing shy or tentative about Gesner’s relationship with the landscape. It is once and always his friend.”

And then there was Sandcastle, born of a love story. In 1968, Gesner found out that Nan Martin, an old friend he had met while attending Santa Monica High School, was coming to Los Angeles to accept an award (at that point, she was an accomplished stage actress who lived in New York). He showed up and, after the ceremony, drove her to a coffee shop to catch up, then to a private cove in Malibu where he showed her the Wave House. He told her that if she married him, he would build her a home right next to it. She soon said yes. In 1970, they were married and Zen was born. And in 1974, they moved into the finished Sandcastle, exactly as Gesner had promised his future wife.

Zen fondly recalls his father’s earth-friendly ethos while growing up in Sandcastle. “It was very organic and exciting, much like the Swiss Family Robinson’s idea of living in a tree house,” he says. “Fires in the fireplace at night, no AC in the house. My dad thought everything through, including the way air travels through a place. He didn’t really believe in air conditioning and thought it could be handled organically.”

Breaking with convention

This ethos extended into the materials used and echoed the counterculture ecological movement that had spread across California in the 1960s and ’70s, a rejection of mass housing and an eye toward environmental consciousness. Gesner fit right in, constructing Sandcastle with 99 percent reclaimed materials. If they were termite-free and of solid quality, “they earned the right of respect to be reborn,” he said in Houses of the Sundown Sea.

The home was made from burl-like bird’s-eye maple pulled from a fire-damaged middle school, marble from public baths slated for demolition, and leaded glass from old churches. Even decommissioned telephone poles from the 1950s provided structural support. And not only did the materials have artistic, spiritual, and ecological value, they resisted the effects of salt air and salt water.

Zen likens Sandcastle’s sanctuary-like setting to “being teleported to Middle-earth,” certainly when contrasted with more typical American homes built in the 1950s and ’60s that were ensconced in neat grids with trimmed lawns. Luckily, Gesner’s clients, like him, wanted something much different. As his career gained traction, Gesner pushed his design ideas even further, much like aviation and boating—fields that inspired him—were doing. Audacity suited him. From the 1950s through the ’70s, he became the guy to call for building on “unbuildable” terrain.

When boats fly

Built on such terrain are Gesner’s much-lauded Boathouses, 20 homes cantilevered over the Cahuenga Pass in the Hollywood Hills. In the late 1950s, Gesner was contacted by Hollywood attorney Ronald Buck, who had purchased a row of sites on Woodrow Wilson Drive so steep that the Los Angeles Times deemed them “unbuildable and worthless.” But Buck recognized Gesner’s creative genius, and Gesner appreciated the challenge. Floating atop soaring caissons, the Boathouses have ribs formed by Norwegian shipbuilders. And with their gabled rooflines and warm, enveloping wood, the Boathouses live up to their names.

Psychotherapist Jane Maki has owned a Boathouse since 1985. Much of it is original, including the 1959-installed appliances in the galley kitchen. Maki notes that some of her Boathouse neighbors have pushed out the angled windows to gain square footage, but she has refrained, so as not to lose the charm. “The angles are part of the ‘boatiness,’” she says. Maki sees about 85 percent of her clients in a serene room on the home’s middle level, and on the main level she has gathered many friends and played percussion in a band called Play’n Lucky. Once, Gesner stopped by.

Maki had met him at a party at one of her neighbor’s Boathouses and asked if he wanted to pop over and see hers. “He was very sparkly,” she remembers. The two of them shared a laugh about the misconception that the Boathouses were meant to mimic the hulls of ships, only upside down. Gesner explained that the shape was instead formed to take the eye up and into the view the moment one walks in the door.

After the Boathouses were built, Gesner designed more homes that jutted out of other hillsides. In Canoga Park, Woodland Hills, and beyond, he “planted” whimsical structures on caissons and always communed with the nature there first. “It’s a lot like your childhood dreams of a treehouse—the house that literally floats in the foliage,” he said in Houses of the Sundown Sea.

Getty gets a Gesner

A few years later, in 1966, the Scantlin House was finished, complete with a swooping roofline. It served as the bachelor pad of entrepreneur John R. “Jack” Scantlin Jr., who invented Quotron, a machine that brought stock market quotes into the digital realm.

Gesner’s design included a pool that, when you swam up to the southern edge, offered a spectacular view of Los Angeles. The pool continues furtively under a wall and into a grotto in the primary bathroom, but due to security concerns, the pool depth was raised and it's no longer possible to swim between the two sections. A bachelor pad at heart that hosted countless gatherings, the home also has a tennis court, outdoor bar, and a fireplace in the bedroom.

“You can just imagine the ’70s LA lifestyle and the things that took place here—the wild parties and so forth,” says Chandler McCoy, principal project specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute. Scantlin sold the home to the J. Paul Getty Trust in 1986, and architect Richard Meier lived in it for 10 years, largely to supervise the Getty Center’s construction. The home has since been used for gatherings of a different persuasion: board meetings, conferences, and Getty-related celebrations.

In 2025, McCoy and his team embarked on a conservation management plan for what Getty staff have nicknamed Trustee House. The team is assessing the home’s cultural and historical significance while determining how to restore and conserve it for future generations.

As enduring as the ocean

Zen says that his dad’s main hope was that his legacy of design work would live on. “He really wanted his archive to be at a place where people could study it—knowing that the Getty has it would thrill him.” He adds that it was also always a delight for his father to see how owners of his homes lived in and cared for them—much like the time Gesner visited Maki.

Maki smiles and reports that birds sometimes fly into her Boathouse. Across town in Malibu, Zen tells a story about the making of Germany’s Gesner biography. During its writing, Gesner revisited many properties he hadn’t seen in years—seeking to witness their growth. He noticed that trees that had been tiny when he built the homes actually did what he imagined they’d do; they turned into glens that now shaded and cooled parts of the houses otherwise exposed to full sun.

Ten years ago, the artist and author Julia Sherman met Gesner at Trustee House to share a salad while Getty produced a video about it. As the sun sets, Gesner admires the building’s expansive view of LA. “I’m quite amazed how it has all changed in my lifetime,” he says, leaning on his cane. “Whole areas didn’t exist; they were beanfields. And what will it be like in another hundred years?”