Painted with light

TURN off the road, pass through blank-faced gates and the house rises at the end of a drive -- an angular blank canvas silhouetted against the sky. Through an aperture in all that whiteness -- actually a pair of mammoth glass doors, perfectly aligned at the home’s front and back -- sun dances on the Pacific, boats bob on the horizon, and Santa Catalina Island comes into focus. Only then does realization strike: You are at land’s end.

That is the first surprise at the house of the Arnoldis -- author Katie and artist Charles, who designed it after getting a bit of advice from a friend named Gehry.

“I approached the design as if I were making a sculpture,” Charles says. “For me, architecture is the same process as making art. You create a problem for yourself that you have to solve. I’m visually oriented. The shape and scale of the house and of the rooms reflect my point of view. They’re big, bold and straightforward.”

From the gate, there’s just that one peekaboo view that allows guests to see through the house to the great beyond. But inside, every room has a glass wall facing the water.

The living room, 35 feet wide by 40 feet long, has an immense hearth and those sliding glass doors, 25 feet wide -- large enough for a dump truck to drive through, as one did recently to unload gravel into the redesigned oceanfront garden.

Even with its 20-foot ceiling and concrete floor, the room feels cozy, the combined effect of the seductively plump red leather sofa and chairs that Charles designed and the paintings that animate both walls.

Round end tables, reminiscent of antiques, are actually contemporary steel creations of Charles’. The artist designed almost every piece of furniture in the house, he says, with the exception of a Noguchi coffee table in the living room and the bentwood Thonet chairs around the Arnoldi-designed aluminum dining table, which has a small Calder sculpture in its center. Arnold Schwarzenegger liked the table so much that he commissioned one for himself, Charles says.

A large leaping fish made of milky glass scales sits on a pedestal. Is it a sculpture? No, it’s a lamp by Frank Gehry. The bulbs are concealed inside.

Gehry’s drawings and sculptures are all over the house, along with art by the Arnoldis’ daughter, Natalie. The high school senior’s works keep company with those of Sam Francis, Robert Graham, Richard Diebenkorn, Jasper Johns and Francesco Clemente, to name a few.

Charles’ artwork is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Norton Simon in Pasadena and New York’s Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art, but it’s rather scantily represented in his home. In fact, the evolution of his art -- from early branch and twig assemblages, chain saw paintings and other woodworks (some currently on view in a show at Pepperdine University) through the diverse styles in sculpture and painting that he’s embraced over the years -- can barely be glimpsed. He estimates that only a quarter of the pieces in the house are his own.

What’s there is riveting. An older black-and-white abstract above the fireplace is a homage to Rosie, a beloved deceased family dog; on the opposite wall is one of Charles’ newest works, a geometric patchwork of brilliant colors.

Planted indoors and out are his 1990s potato sculptures, oddly comforting clusters of organic shapes that a writer in Artnews called “as pleasing as a Buddha’s belly.”

THE stark simplicity of the house, built 24 years ago atop a cliff overlooking a prized surfing spot, might be called a beacon of architectural sanity in this increasingly glitzed-up area of west Malibu. The design’s strength, Santa Monica artist and friend Peter Alexander says, is that it takes beautiful advantage of its site.

“Our house isn’t fancy,” Katie says, comparing it to some of the gaudy dwellings that have sprung up. She remembers when the neighborhood was mostly rural and blue collar, and almost all sports and social activities were focused on the beach. Nowadays, newcomers from the city are demanding street lights and sidewalks, she says, trying to create the same kind of urban jungle from which they so recently fled.

Artist Laddie John Dill, another friend of the Arnoldis, says he’s “always struck by the simplicity and transparency of the house.”

“I like that when you pull up, you can see right through it to that world-class view,” Dill says. “But when you’re inside, it feels very private. I like the way he’s made the horizon line very much a part of the architecture itself.”

Katie, 49, has been surfing here since she was a child. Her father, Richard Lee Anawalt, the late owner of Anawalt Lumber, bought a small cottage and 3 acres of mostly unbuilt land for $39,000. Charles, 61, took up surfing 15 years ago, so he could enjoy the sport with his wife and kids.

Both the Arnoldi children grew up on this beach, surfing and snorkeling with their parents and friends. The history of their family is written on this cliff and in this house.

He was 34 and she was 21 when they met. He was already famous; she was an art history major who had studied him in college.

“Chuck was traveling a lot in those days for shows all over the world,” says Katie, whose first novel, “Chemical Pink,” was a 2001 bestseller and whose second, “The Wentworths,” is out this month.

“I was traveling with him so often that it was impossible to dig into a career. I loved him, but I wasn’t willing to follow him around unless we committed to making a future together.”

So when she turned 22, she proposed marriage, knowing he might not say yes.

“He came from a very troubled background,” she says, “and the idea of family just didn’t fit into his plan.”

She remembers Charles sitting on the couch in his Venice studio, tears streaming down his cheeks. He said he needed to ask his best friends, Frank and Berta Gehry, what he should do.

So Katie stayed put while Charles drove to the Gehrys’, where he was advised to take the plunge. “We’ve been married 26 years in June,” Katie says, “and we often spend the anniversary with them.”

KATIE and her older brother shared a building permit for the Malibu land, so when he wanted to start construction, the newly wed Arnoldis decided to erect something too.

“I was a bit confused about what to build,” says Charles, who consulted Gehry. “Frank said: If you don’t know what to do, just build a big box. So I did.”

He chuckles at the self-serving floor plan he came up with -- one that consisted of mostly work space for him and ignored the possibility of children.

“It was a 4,800-square-foot one-bedroom, one-bath house,” he says.

The huge living room has a kitchen and dining room off to one side, with stairs at opposite ends. One stairway leads up to the master suite, which overlooks the water and, through a massive swiveling window, the living room below. Another set of steps leads up to what had been a huge loft space that Charles envisioned as a studio for himself.

The greatness of his vision, Katie says, is that the design turned out to be ideal in size and concept for the growing family her husband could not foresee. “When our children needed bedrooms, bye-bye went Chuck’s potential loft,” she says. The upstairs was converted into two kids’ bedrooms with a bath in between.

Today, Charles works six days a week at the Venice studio compound he has owned for years. Katie, who says she can’t work at home because the ocean view is too distracting, writes from a shared Santa Monica space called theOffice, which her kids jokingly refer to as adult day care.

After work, however, the family unwinds in Malibu at what is truly a beach house -- casual, comfortable and impervious to anything the dogs and kids (now 17 and 19) might track in. The home’s original hand-troweled concrete floors -- popular now, but less common when Charles first installed them -- have never needed refinishing. The inch-thick pieces of black rubber on the stairs have endured.

The Arnoldis’ artistic inspiration carried over into the garden, according to landscape designer Maureen Barnes. The area fronting the ocean used to have grass but has been redesigned to resemble a minimalist sculpture installation, with a floor of pale gravel and cactuses arranged to look like they’re blowing in the wind. Mature aloe and yucca, tall and spectral, stand lonely sentry.

“They both knew exactly what they wanted,” Barnes says. “Chuck had a full-blown vision of it in his head. I didn’t really have to design a thing.”

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bettijane.levine@latimes.com

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The artist’s eye

FOR their cliff-top garden overlooking the ocean, Charles and Katie Arnoldi recently replaced their lawn with a landscape that requires no watering or maintenance and is as visually captivating as the couple’s art collection. “We spent a lot of time selecting cactuses as if they were sculptures and as if each had an individual personality,” says Maureen Barnes, the garden designer who helped the couple. Some of the concepts that shaped their design:

Barrel cactus: “The unifying element,” Charles says, referring to “soft barrel cactuses arranged to appear as if they are blowing in the wind.”

Vertical contrast: Landscape contractor Chris Wilson scouted the property and found two old, tall trees -- a Yucca elata and an Aloe barberae, also called Aloe bainesii (visible through the dining room window on Page 1) -- that were transplanted in the new garden. They are powerful vertical elements in an otherwise uninterrupted horizontal plane running out to sea.

Space: Each cactus, Barnes says, has room to breathe and be itself -- “like artworks.”

-- Bettijane Levine