After nearly three years on the market, Dick Clark‘s widow has finally sold their house in Malibu, for $1.778 million, just a little more than half of its original asking price. That’s kind of weird, because the house sits on nearly 23 blufftop acres. It’s also weird that the house looks straight out of the Flintstones, to the point where we’re wondering which cabinet holds the bird-powered record player. Turns out the oddly low sale price and the architecture might have the same weird back-story. CNN Money talked to architect Phillip Jon Brown back in 2012, and he explained that the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy was not into the idea of Clark building anything on the wild site; he says that Clark “dug in his heels and said he was going to build a house there … I came up with the idea that if the house looked like a rock formation, the park conservancy would let us build on top. They liked the concept.”
The result is a one-bedroom, two-bathroom, free-form house with an interior made of wood and steel covered in concrete for that prehistoric look; the exterior is “heavy stucco with lots of rocks thrown into the mix.” Brown says they scrubbed some of the stucco while it was still wet to give it a decomposed granite look. Irregular windows and giant glass expanses provide 360-degree views.
The Santa Monica Mountains are even more thoroughly protected now than ever; since Dick Clark himself had trouble getting permission to build, it seems unlikely that the new buyer will be allowed to throw up something new here. Still, U2’s The Edge has just about talked his way into building several houses on a pristine cliff in Malibu, so we won’t say it’s impossible that the new owner will pave Bedrock and put up a megamansion. Source: Curbed.com
