Interiors  ·  News & Ideas  ·  Residential

Jason Statham’s Malibu Beach House Embodies His Connection to Nature

September 13, 2023

The English actor’s makeover of a surf home includes plenty of Danish midcentury furnishings and his own photography

by Kathryn Romeyn
Photo by Daniel Smith
For English actor Jason Statham, the decision in 2009 to buy a Malibu beach house was not part of the plan. He didn’t even know if it would be a sound investment. All impulse, the idea came about while staying with a friend in their Malibu Colony home. “It made such an impact on me,” he recalls. “In the U.K. we don’t get to the beach much, and these houses have a great connection with the ocean and nature.” Morning walks along the sand glimpsing abundant sea life and surfers riding swell proved irresistible. “I had been in L.A. quite a while, but I just thought, This is the place I want to live,” says Statham.
From the sand, he picked his perfect pad without even knowing it was on the market—“a really tired old surfing house,” he describes: run-down and salt-sprayed but in a gorgeous setting low on the beach. “If I ever got a house it’d be like that one there,” he remembers saying. “It had a real great connection with the sand and the sea, all framed within this one window.” Statham bought it in short order and quickly embarked on a meticulous ground-up rebuild that retained the footprint and key architectural elements—that picture window right on the property line, a brick fireplace, and a slanted roof that shields the south-facing home from harsh midday sun. “A lot of the original features were really quite appealing,” he says, looking back.
Statham sits in a vintage Hans Wegner swivel chair at his computer in the office where he not only tends to work matters but also listens to reggae from his powerful, architectural Bowers & Wilkins speakers.
In Statham’s iteration, the surf shack became cozy, chic, and serene. An exterior of black cedar shingles with copper gutters gone green from the salt gives it a certain sleekness. As someone who notices details in his surroundings, Statham took cues on materiality from diverse buildings and homes, namely those of Richard Neutra. “I wanted to retain what was there before but make it look more robust,” says the actor, who opened the almost 4,000-square-foot layout so “at all times you’re connected with the sea.” He deepened his personal connection to it as well, translating his skateboarding skills to the water with the help of Malibu longboarding legend Takuji Masuda.
When it came to interiors, Statham took on the job himself. “A designer will just put in what they want and you end up having to live with it,” he comments. Coming from a post-and-beam house in West Hollywood, he was “obsessed” with featuring midcentury Danish furniture in his new weekend home. “I didn’t want a place that was too precious or too pretentious, so everything’s sort of old and lived-in and in a single palette,” he says. Statham sourced his furnishings and lighting at Denmark 50, where he’d struck up a friendship with owner Wayne Marmorstein. “He was my lifeline for this project, literally the only person I get stuff from,” says Statham. “I got an education from him.” The actor’s Scandinavian infatuation informed his entire abode’s aesthetic. Marmorstein introduced him to the world of ceramics too, helping him discover Danish potter Axel Salto’s work, now sprinkled throughout.
The peaceful master bedroom—accessorized with lamps from Denmark 50 and teak shelves holding black-and-white photography—opens to a small balcony looking down the slanted roof to the beach, a view that’s happily without glare, Statham says: “The slanted roof creates incredible shade over all the windows, almost like the peak of a baseball hat, and allows you to not have fancy blinds and window treatments.”
When arranging furniture and accoutrements, Statham opted for practicality over contrived curation. For him, comfort reigns. “I wanted to come in off the beach and flop down in my shorts—nice and easy.” The immense custom sofa enveloping the beach-facing room perfectly embodies this desire; it’s his favorite place to lie and take in nature’s “beautiful spectrum of colors and moods.” In the living room, a designer likely would have carefully selected curios and books for the large shelves flanking the dominating brick fireplace, where come winter, he, partner Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, and their two-year-old, like to sit. “But I didn’t want to go out and buy a ton of books to put on the shelf,” says Statham. “I thought, I’ll just go buy a load of wood. It was filling a hole rather than a design idea, but in the end it looked really good!”
Not wanting to feel pressured to quickly find large pieces of artwork for the walls, Statham added floating teak shelves throughout the house. Necessity led him to pick up his own camera with black-and-white film while vacationing at Utah’s Amangiri, snapping some shots to frame for them. Over time he’s added images by Richard Misrach, ’70s skateboard photographer Hugh Holland, and LeRoy Grannis, the godfather of surf photography—although he realizes “it is slightly cliché to have surf photos in a surf house.”
The floating teak shelves in the dining room—installed by the carpenter who’d done Statham’s deck—were a reaction to not having a large enough piece of art to hang above his Danish table and Niels O. Møller chairs. They hold a few pieces by Danish potter Axel Salto. “I just love his stuff; every time I see one I get it,” says Statham, adding, “I think the end result was almost preferable to having some big painting there.” 
“We’ve had so many different chairs in there in front of the fire; we’ve had beanbags on the floor, now the Hunting Chairs. It’s been great to try and figure out what looks best,” says Statham of his ever-evolving approach to designing his weekend beach house. The wood installation around the fireplace was a simple solution to not having time or the desire to buy books simply for show. The painting was a gift from a friend, done by an artist from a remote Australian tribe.
The sea-facing room with its picture window right on the property line is his favorite spot in the house to relax, on the soft custom sofa: “You literally just lay down on and take a snooze. It has a really great vibe about it.” CH25 lounge chairs by Hans Wegner and artwork by a Utah artist complete the zen space. “You see every color of the sun and how it reflects on the sea, and you connect with the weather to such a degree there. It really is a fascinating, special place to sit, right there on the edge of the ocean.”
Living right in front of a famous surf break, Statham enjoyed relaxing on his Burmese teak deck, but quickly felt called into the water. He looked to local “surfboard whisperer” Takuji Masuda for an introduction to the sport, which he picked up quickly thanks to his skateboarding background: “Literally everybody you think could surf, he’s taught them. He gets people standing up within a day.”
Statham and his family hang out in the kitchen a lot, so he wanted it to be bulletproof, idolizing a friend’s Bulthaup kitchen. “It looks as good today as it did when I first got it,” he says of the indestructible German-made cabinetry.
“I learned something rather quickly: The moisture in the evening comes in rather quickly,” says Statham. “At six o’clock everything is sort of wet and damp.” To adapt, he chose durable resilient materials inside that wouldn’t be destroyed by the seaside atmosphere, like Hans Wegner Wishbone chairs.
“I’m quite obsessed with good sound; we used to go out jumping around in raves when we were younger,” says Statham, who filled his home with countless hidden Bowers & Wilkins speakers and heavy subwoofers. “What are the things you do when you make a bit of money for the first time? You spend it on things you wanted as a kid,” he says. One pair sit in his office alongside LeRoy Grannis photographs and Hans Wegner sofas. “The house shakes.”
The peaceful master bedroom—accessorized with lamps from Denmark 50 and teak shelves holding black-and-white photography—opens to a small balcony looking down the slanted roof to the beach, a view that’s happily without glare, Statham says. “The slanted roof creates incredible shade over all the windows, almost like the peak of a baseball hat, and allows you to not have fancy blinds and window treatments.”
Statham chose all the fixtures and materials for his bathrooms: “On my days off I was kicking around these stores, picking things up, feeling them, and looking at the finishes. I enjoyed the discovery of it all.” The guest bathroom he based around Richard Neutra’s Singleton House, complete with terrazzo tiles and a steam room in pietra serena sandstone.
“There’s a great old Jacuzzi we retained, sort of a stand-up Jacuzzi, so you come out of the cold sea and dive in and get warm again,” says Statham of the feature embedded in the Burmese teak deck that gets a lot of use. “We’ve got a baby, and to see him kicking around and digging holes in the sand, there’s literally nothing more playful and fun. It just makes your heart melt to see him exploring the beach.”
Being on a quiet private road has allowed Statham to collect toys to play around with, not only his beloved Triumph motorcycles but one-wheeled skateboards and electric bikes. “You can just scoot around and have some fun out back,” he says. 
This article is originally available in www.architecturaldigest.com