Upwardly mobile homes

Early each morning, Bobbie Hurst steps onto her porch on a bluff above the Pacific. Across Santa Monica Bay, sunrise tips the towers of downtown Los Angeles with silver. Sea lions and dolphins hunt their breakfast in the surf below. Catalina Island shimmers in the distance.

Look to the left and there’s the palatial estate Dodi Fayed was renovating for Princess Diana before their fatal car crash. To the right stand the French chateau and blue country cottage of Barbra Streisand’s compound.

“People ask me where I live, and I tell them ‘paradise,’ ” Hurst said, standing on the steps of her wide, welcoming veranda.

Close. It’s Paradise Cove, and believe it or not, it’s a mobile home park on the beach in Malibu, some of the most exclusive and expensive real estate in the world.

Over the last few years as real estate prices have skyrocketed, Malibu’s two mobile home parks have been transformed into chic seaside enclaves, where such celebrities as Minnie Driver and Sally Field live chassis-by-chassis with residents seeking the perfect wave and a priceless view. As with many expensive neighborhoods around Los Angeles, the renovating bug took hold. Now, amid wraparound decks and chandeliers, pitched roofs and Viking stoves, it’s easy to forget that this was ever once a mobile home park at all.

Sure, Hurst’s elegant house is actually a trailer registered with the Department of Motor Vehicles. And yes, it was delivered and assembled by burly guys driving a semi. But with hardwood floors and high-end appliances and that custom-built porch, the Hurst home has morphed into Hurst Castle.

“The first time I saw the unit, I knew I had to add a porch because I love to entertain and to be outdoors,” said Hurst, a retiree who moved from Reseda four years ago. “I found a porch I liked in a design magazine and showed the pictures to my contractor

Hurst is among this new wave of homeowners transforming their trailers. Out with the tobacco-brown paneling, aluminum windows and shag carpeting.

Adios to cheesy appliances and cottage cheese ceilings. Newcomers install hardwood floors, crown moldings, Wolf ranges, Sub-Zero refrigerators, custom-built cabinets, marble countertops and enough kitchen islands to form an archipelago.

The mobile home boom began in the late 1990s, when the first flush of wealth from the New Economy boosted sales of second homes. At that time, traditional homes located high in the hills in Malibu started at about $500,000. Mobile homes, just a few hundred feet from the beach, started at $50,000.

In 1996, a Paradise Cove trailer was the only piece of Malibu my husband and I could afford. To us, it was like Mayberry with surfboards.

We braved family displeasure to become part of the trailer class. Now amid the whine of Skilsaws and the snap of pneumatic hammers, we’re watching our sleepy little trailer park turn into a renovator’s paradise.

With extras such as gated entries, security patrols, tennis courts and club houses, the mobile home parks have quickly gained wide appeal. Paradise Cove trailers on the market today range from $135,000 for a small trailer in the lower section of the park to about $650,000 for a larger unit on the bluff with an ocean view. Residents in this park and Malibu’s other beachside mobile home park, the Point Dume Club, rent the space. Monthly rents in Paradise Cove range from about $500 to more than $2,000. Zoning laws designate the land for mobile home use only. No traditional houses allowed. But what residents do from the wheels up is another story.

“People take one look at these places, and that whole trailer-trash thing goes away,” said Kirk Murray, a Pritchett-Rapf Realtor who moved to Paradise Cove soon after he started a family.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, Paradise Cove was a campground. Summer visitors pulling trailers bumped down the dirt road, broke out their barbecues and spent the warm days at the beach. When dozens of summer visitors simply moved into their campers and paid rental fees year-round, the Paradise Cove Mobile Home Park was born.

In 1972, the park’s owners graded the bluff above the beach and installed utilities. Buyers chose among several trailer models, selected a home site, placed their orders at the front office and, when the coaches were delivered, moved in.

A year later Point Dume Club, Malibu’s other beachside mobile home park, took shape. The owners carved a bluff, layered it like a wedding cake and installed 300 mobile homes. They sold quickly.

Former Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler, a race car driver and avid surfer, owned three different trailers in Paradise Cove.

It was well-known that “The Wild Bunch” director Sam Peckinpah shot bullets from his couch into the back wall of his mobile home when he got drunk. When his space rent was overdue, he’d try to placate the Cove’s owner by sending her huge bouquets of flowers.

“Things would get raucous over there” at Peckinpah’s, said contractor Marty King, who grew up in Paradise Cove. “You’d see the liquor store guy drive up there to drop off booze. We kids thought the guy was kind of scary, and we’d pretty much avoid his place.”

Today, Paradise Cove, a rustic 60 acres studded with trees, has a small-town feel. Kids ride their bikes through the streets. Neighbors lean from their decks to chat. The surfers gather on the bluff to check the swell. The only loud noise is the crack of a renovator’s hammer.

Maggie Bright, a designer whose personal tastes tend toward the modern, has used paint and color to banish the dark and dreary feel of her 1973 trailer. She dog-proofed with a white tile floor that unified the space. Multiple layers of a creamy Ralph Lauren paint gave the brown paneled walls the smooth, silky look of bead board.

Outside, Bright swathed one side of her house in silvery corrugated metal siding, both a nod to architect Frank Gehry and a homage to the Airstream trailer.

“It was an inexpensive material, and I liked the in-joke. I mean, this is a trailer we’re living in,” Bright said.

Don’t tell that to Lorraine Jennings, who has banished the word “trailer” from the family vocabulary when describing their Point Dume Club home. She’s not fond of “coach,” “unit” or even “mobile home.” Manufactured house? Well, maybe.

Jennings and her husband, Mike, were living in a Malibu townhouse when they fell for the trailer’s unobstructed ocean views.

“Everything we did -- from adding big windows and sliding glass doors to taking off the heavy roof on the deck -- was about letting the amazing view into the house,” Mike said. “We wanted it to have a Mediterranean feel. That’s what’s great about these places -- you can make them into what you want.”

What Tris Imboden and his wife, Kelly, wanted was a home that straddled the line between the Moorish style of Malibu Potteries and the island vibe of Kauai’s north shore.

Tris, the drummer for the band Chicago, and Kelly, business manager for Stephen Stills, had been living in a tiny unit in the lower section of Paradise Cove when they happened across a “for sale” sign.

“I walked in the front door and the sun was throwing rainbows through the leaded glass windows in the living room,” Kelly Imboden said.

She turned the corner into the kitchen, got a glimpse of the ocean view and she was sold.

“I felt this surge of energy,” she said. “I just turned to the Realtor and said, ‘This is my house.’ ”

As soon as escrow closed, the Imbodens started remodeling. They hired Malibu contractor Ken Nilsen to take out the very ‘80s dropped ceiling in the kitchen and add deep-set skylights to give height and add light to the room.

“The kitchen was awful and the bathroom was just plain scary,” Kelly said. “I mean, the toilet was so close to the wall, you had to sit sideways to use it.”

She expanded the bathroom, installed a skylight, added a glass shower and tiled the floors and countertops.

“We were lucky because Ken Nilsen’s an artist -- his work is in harmony with nature,” Kelly said. “Have you seen his place?”

Nilsen’s trailer is one of two he has owned in Paradise Cove over the last 19 years. Step inside and you see a craftsman’s love of wood and workmanship.

“It was pretty bad when I first saw it -- lime green carpet, brown paneling, acoustical tile on the ceiling,” Nilsen said.

He vanquished the “Rockford Files” ambience with drywall, tile and a hardwood floor. An Arts and Crafts palette of greens and browns, stained glass windows and built-in cabinets crafted from a variety of hardwoods gave Nilsen’s trailer a Craftsman feel.

Unlike the permit process for a traditional home, which can take months or even years, mobile home permits take a matter of days. Draw up the plans, take them to the department of Housing and Community Development in Riverside and you’re in business.

It’s a familiar process for Malibu contractor John M. Bell and his wife, Sandy. The couple has remodeled and sold two trailers in Paradise Cove and they’re living in and redoing a third.

Bell recommends three major exterior changes -- change the flat roof line by adding a pitched, faux roof, getting rid of the aluminum siding, and swapping out aluminum windows and flimsy doors for higher-end products.

“My first thing is, I put in French doors,” Sandy said. “It brings the outside in and changes the whole dynamic of the house.”

Although she refuses to call herself a designer, Sandy Bell is known within Paradise Cove renovation circles for her kitchen remodels. Each of the three homes she redid had a different kitchen style. Her current home balances her taste for country with her husband’s love of modern.

Glass-fronted wood cabinets and liberal display of her collectibles fill her needs, while the stainless-steel refrigerator gives John Bell the sleek look he craves. Both agree that skimping on appliances is silly.

“I love the commercial appliances -- the big refrigerator, the big stove -- it really makes the kitchen come to life for me.”

Sandy estimates she’s spent about $50,000 remodeling her new place, a 1973 one-bedroom, one-bath on a small bluff with an ocean view.

“This is it for us -- we’re not moving,” she said.