Tasteful Friends: Former Lee Philip Bell Malibu Colony House

I'm not usually a fan of that much white, but there's just enough color here that it works. It feels comfortable and casual rather than sterile.

The house was listed three days ago. Sheldon Adelson owns a Vegas casino empire and he's paying his workers throughout the crisis. He must have though, "Hey, I don't need eleven houses in Malibu Colony."

Lee kicked over not that long ago.

Looks like she had pretty good taste.

I love it.

It looks incredibly comfortable, and not like a showplace.

Way too stark for me, and a white floor looks like a nightmare. It’s pretty for a public space but I wouldn’t want to live there.

I love it....warm and unpretentious.

It's wonderful. I'm not a big fan of all-white everything either, but it suits the location.

On the right you can see the house in its early days. I wish there were more.

Only $108k a month mortgage and taxes! A steal!

It's all perfect except the Walmart rugs.

Its unpretentiousness is its greatest luxury, but it's an absurdly expensive price to not be pretentious.

It's a house for someone with real throwaway money, I suppose, or someone filthy rich who doesn't want a big or a grand house, a buyer who finds it quaint to camp out at the beach house with its pokey little stairs stuck away in closets, its Maine summer cottage painted floors, its low ceilings, its guest house I'm not sure the listing agent bothers to show the inside of, and its (rather beautiful) kids bedrooms stuck up under the eaves - only they are the only bedrooms in the main house.

The big living room and the bedrooms and the landside entrance court are the selling points to me, all show of the studied vernacular look of the architecture which draws on various Early American traditions but with some imagination and modernity. Those leaded glass windows with the purposeful "breaks" are fantastic to find here.

The ugly pool and the beach frontage are lost on me, and the ugliest thing about the place is the aquamarine blue of the pool, some wood floors, and the decking near the pool. If I were ever to live on the ocean it would have to be a craggy, moody, turbulent landscape. If I were ever to have a pool it would be dark like the night and not in the shape of a bodily organ. Malibu is not for me so I'm a poor one to judge this place, but I have to think I would have to have scandalous money to pay so much for so little in a place I don't care about.

A beach shack - for a showy casino billionaire. Seems contradictory. I would expect him to have a Drake type house.

Finest house in Malibu?

Um, no.

That may be my ideal beach home.

But with the endless threat of fires, I would never live in Malibu.

But what a home.

Funky beach shack for over $20mil.

White is the least of its problems... one thing that I'd change immediately is to get rid of the lawns. 1) California is a semi-arid Mediterranean zone, no lawns 2) beach shacks shouldn't have lawns and especially 3) the lawns reinforce the fact that the house looks like it exists in some slightly seedy, formerly upscale suburb. Torrance? Monrovia?

I bet when it had all that dark paneling before being painted white it was beautiful.

Is it Monty Beragon-adjacent?

I'd have to walk around all day in sunglasses - that shit is way too white and with the sun reflecting on the ocean water in the afternoon?

I'd be blind before the year was out. There is such a thing as 'too much light'.

What's a "random" niece?

r20 One whose house gets sold from under her Walmart rugs.

The rest of the furniture has been with the house since the Bell family owned it, even the surfboards out the kitchen window.

r12 The house has at least 4 bedrooms, plus a studio over the garage which is probably the guest house. It has it's own stairs and door.

Thanks, R12. I assumed the guest house was not too noteworthy.

The mark of a good real estate agent is one with carefully sequenced photography that shows the key elements of a property in a logical sequence so that you know what part of the house each photo represents (and for a lazy fucker - and what realtor isn't? - there are always captions.) Once in a while I see it done well, but it's rare except in properties so basic that it's the natural default.

Beautiful but .. the beach is gone and the ceilings are abit low.

Love the guest bedroom with the fireplace in the corner. Really love all of this house, but it is wildly overpriced based on size and location. You won't have that home more than 10 years, thanks to climate change.

Love the house, but all that white is too much. I even love the humble little kitchen.

My kind of place.

You'd have to deal with Chad Rogers. Hard pass.

Yikes, R28. Dealing with Chad Rogers [italic]and[/italic], however indirectly, Sheldon Adelson. I'm not a man with a great many principles that get in the way of things but I can't find it in my heart to part with a penny for either of these two.

What is the difference between living in the Malibu Colony and living in Malibu? Any pros vs cons? Does one affect price?

Very expensive tear down. A house like that has a myriad of structural and practical deficiencies that outweigh its negligible charms. If you have the money and want to live there, you will find other, better options.

The Colony is gated and your driveway isn't on a five-lane highway. A standard oceanfront Malibu Colony house is $10 million. This is one of the few houses on a double width lot, so it's priced accordingly at $21 million. The lot could accommodate a much larger house.

r25 That's no guest room, that's the master suite. And isn't it fabulous? I love how cozy the little sleeping area is.

The beach comes and goes with the seasons. The sand drifts offshore and forms sandbars in the winter, then the beach rebuilds itself in the spring.

I first saw this house for sale in 2012 and thought "oh my, the rising seas will reclaim it soon". It's been almost 10 years and it's still just as it was back then.

Bedroom #3 is almost the same as bedroom #2, but on the inland side of the house.

Bedroom #4 is on the first floor near the garage.

Bedroom #2 used to be more whimsical.

Waaay too much white for me, and I like white. I wouldn't be able to stand the white floor for starters. Also, knowing that rich asshole Adelson owned it is a big turn off.

No thanks.

The great thing about paint is that it comes in multiple colors.

r29- please enlighten us about these gentlemen.

Finally, a video tour.

And a very well done, very in depth 360 virtual tour.

The white on the walls works and the location is great, but it just seems kind of cheap to me. They put in a very expensive stove and nice countertops, but left the old kitchen cabinets. I find the painted wood panels look busy. The whole things seems kind of sad, just my opinion. Someone's going to have fun renovating it, because it's got great light and some great design opportunities. It just feels like they thought a coat of white paint would take care of more problems than paint is capable of.

Look at the state of the shingles outside and the windows! Tear down!

The house doesn't take advantage of the ocean views. The house seems really low and the windows seem small and sparse, considering the view. I think that is why there is so much white everywhere, to compensate for the closed-in feeling.

Also, as noted, the pool is ugly.

Such goyische taste. Feh.

[quote] but left the old kitchen cabinets

That's one of the things I like best about it!

Because of r42 I was thinking about this house being torn down and there being nothing left like it. My thoughts drifted to the now demolished house of Roddy McDowall from his home movies.

This house has a cameo in the upper right! I had always wondered where in Malibu Colony his house was.

I guess I admire the restraint that has been shown with this house. It's easy to come along and gut it, and make the rear wall one large pane of glass. To not do that is impressive. What others see as sad, cheap and "structurally unsound" I see as authentic. It's a beach shack.

I'm sorry, but it looks cheaply constructed to me. Looks like a converted barn painted white.

Totally undistinguished beach house. Blah. I've been in one room shacks in Cherry Grove that have more charm and character.

I like it a lot. I love white, though. The price, however, makes one feel violated simply by reading seeing it.

Too Much White!

It does have character though, I quite like it otherwise. Filled with old furniture etc it could be really nice, as it is its a bit of a blank canvas which is not a bad thing

I love it. When do I move in?

Though I like the house, the link shows the reason I don't.

For less than 10% of the price, I could buy a beautiful, manageably sized 15th Century Elizabethan house with fine details, the design and character of which are the antecedent to this Malibu Colony house.

Sure the place in Malibu Colony is studied and restrained in it's simplicity and charm: a billionaire's beach shack. But without having to live in LA, without having to be a billionaire, without having a glass windshield in front of my house looking out at a rather dull stretch of sand, and with a couple of acres in a nice setting under an hour by train from London, I'd go for authenticity over Hollywood stage set, $2M over $22M. It's another house and another place and another experience entirely, but it's just a bit of a joke to me that the Malibu house could be $22M, it's just so Goop in too many ways.

[quote] I'm sorry, but it looks cheaply constructed to me. Looks like a converted barn painted white.

It’s a rather drab shitty old house, sitting on prime real estate. If the same house were located in Cleveland or some small town in the middle of nowhere. No one would be raving about how that drab house is so “unpretentious” and wonderful. Dataloungers are full of shit!

R46, I don’t think Roddy’s beach house was in the Colony. I think it was just a regular Malibu beachfront. I also recall reading that he only rented it; never owned it.

Malibu only exploded in value in the 1980’s. Back in the 1950-1970’s, the area was loaded with beach shacks that could be rented for less than a place in town. A lot of young actors, like Robert Logan, lived there on the cheap. Right on the beach!

In about 1985, prices surged and are astronomic today for oceanfront property. Over the last 40 years, Malibu property has outperformed almost any other real estate investment.

This must have been completely restaged because I cannot see Adelson living this tastefully.

R55: I can't imagine that hippopotamus ever setting foot inside the house.

Soon to be swept away.

r54 The rented beach house from Roddy McDowall's home movies absolutely was in the Colony. It had the telltale Colony bulkhead/seawall which isn't found anywhere else in Malibu. There's also a video where Roddy and a group of men walk west to the house from the Malibu Lagoon/Surfrider and it's made 100% clear. Perhaps he later owned or rented another house that was elsewhere.

As far as I know, Adelson never lived in this house. He bought it furnished from Lee Philip Bell and now owns 9 properties in the neighborhood. [quote]back in late 2013, he paid soap opera creator Lee Phillip Bell about $13.3 million for her two Colony properties; since then, he’s steadily added more and more homes to his portfolio, for a total outlay of about $90 million so far.

[quote]If the same house were located in Cleveland or some small town in the middle of nowhere. No one would be raving about how that drab house is so “unpretentious” and wonderful. Dataloungers are full of shit!

r53 Exactly. No one would care if this house was in Cleveland, and that's fine because it's not, it's on the ocean in Malibu. Now, go do good someplace else.

Variety and The Malibu Times list Sheldon Adelson as the owner since 2013, which is what I've known for years. Yahoo! Finance says Lee Philip Bell's family is selling the house and they are surprised that Adelson hasn't added it to his collection yet. I'm gonna go with Variety.

[quote]Although it’s a bit surprising that the king of Malibu Colony himself — casino kingpin Sheldon Adelson — hasn’t snapped it up already, the prized oceanfront estate of late soap opera creator Lee Phillip Bell is available for billionaire grabs.

On a side note, at the end of my life, all I want is one of these photos of a fabulous house, with a little cutout of my face in a corner, saying my heirs have listed my longtime home for sale.

Addelson is a filthy, corrupt, little blob of a Tump loving shitstain. And no amount of billions of dollars will ever change that.

What an ugly “house” if I can even call it that. And that pool.... ugh.

[quote] [R53] Exactly. No one would care if this house was in Cleveland, and that's fine because it's not, it's on the ocean in Malibu. Now, go do good someplace else.

Ruth dear you have shitty taste. And no one is impressed with Sheldon Adelson, paying his employees. He’s given hundreds of millions to Republicans. He is one of the chief beneficiaries of the Republican tax cuts and Trump will no doubt hand him billions of dollars in bail out money.

R58, thanks for the correction on the location of Roddy’s beach house. Never knew it was in the Colony. I believe you, but, back in the day weren’t there lots of Malibu beach houses with decks right on the sand? I’ve seen that design in so many movies and they couldn’t have all been shot inside the Colony gates.

You seem to care a lot more about Sheldon Adelson than I do. When I fell in love with this house he wasn't even in the picture. I didn't even know how to spell his name until I started this thread.

Yeah r63. Only the Colony has this wall setup. Carbon Beach has wide dry sand, no walls. Broad Beach always had dunes, now a rock wall (Grace and Frankie). Most everywhere else in Malibu the beach houses are seemingly built on stilts in the wet sand or up on a bluff.

The only thing I can recall seeing The Colony is in Two and a Half Men, it's where they live. I've only seen a couple of episodes but they show long shots of the houses on the beach in between scenes. I'm sure it's in a lot of other things, which I'd love to see.

Million Dollar Listing weirdo Chad Rogers has the listing.

Ruth, I just assumed you were from Connecticut. You know a lot about Malibu!

Please watch for another Malibu Tasteful thread, showing off a tiny Malibu beach house that’s currently on the market. I love it and would like to get your and everyone’s take on it.

r67 Can't wait =)

I am sure Adelson used this asa guest house only or servants quarters. I like the house. Very few on the beach have pools. Having a double lot is huge. It will be a teardown. The colony is gated and it makes it more expensive. I think Roddy s house was a seasonal rental. He lived for a long time in a nice house south of ventura blvd in studio city.