The stone whisperer

A wall built by Shannon McCluskey can take time. Sometimes even he doesn’t know what he’s thinking, he’s just in a zone as he ponders the jumble of rocks he’s collected in an Agoura creek, looking for just the right one that will keep the flow going, stone by stone, until another McCluskey original arises. “I love to watch him work,” says Malibu Lake resident Lisa Coghlan. “He’ll put one rock in, step back and look, and then he might move it.” It’s hard not to run into McCluskey’s work around Agoura, the pillars, walls, planters, benches and fireplaces. McCluskey has called this area home since childhood. And when he isn’t putting stone to stone, such as finding just the right rock to use as a shower seat (“did you see how it fit the cheeks?”), he’s hiking all over the local trails. His life as a stonemason started around 1980, when he was asked to help with a wall at the entrance to a rustic property. “It was on-the-job training,” he recounts, but fortunately the owner told the masons to have some fun, and they did: There’s a patch of mortar behind one wall with a smiling face traced in it.

Paul and Leah Culberg love to point out McCluskey touches at their Lobo Canyon garden: geodes glinting here and there, an upturned beer bottle sunk into one wall, a tiny shard of terra cotta. For one Malibu Lake dock he made a wall topped with duck decoys the owner had collected. He felt sorry for the duck with the broken neck so he made it a nest of shells. His masterpiece may be a gated sandstone wall that beautifully mimics the ridgeline of the mountain behind it. The leveraged layers look effortless. They weren’t, and he “was glad when it was over.” Then he remembers why he loves his work. “I’m outside,” he points out, “not in an office rotting away.”

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(Stone Tip) McCluskey uses regular cement as opposed to plastic cement in his work. The latter is stickier, which is good for some projects, but plastic cement also contains lime that bleaches out as it cures. Cement without lime cures darker, which looks better with stone.

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Shannon McCluskey, (818) 707-1284.