Beach House

Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks slept here as well as in their famous Pickfair in Beverly Hills: Here is a Santa Monica house, where a $500,000 interior design job was being finished last week. "It was their beach house, and they lived here in the summers," interior designer Bobi Leonard said of the Hollywood couple who entertained royalty and other distinguished guests while they were married from 1920 to 1936.

The Beach House, perched above the sands of Laguna Beach, has come a long way since it was launched in the summer of 1968. This one-time vacation home of '30s actor/comedian Slim Summerville first attracted patrons mostly with its homey charm and sweeping panorama of the Pacific. But over the years it's the menu that has kept the diners coming.

From the road, the Ackerberg House in Malibu is just another blank wall, although a little more elegant than its neighbors. But from the beach, the house is an exuberant mass of big windows that open to the view of the ocean. Holding together this beach palace is a tight grid of rational organization executed by the master of elegant modernism, architect Richard Meier. Together with fellow New Yorker Charles Gwathmey, Meier invented the modern beach house.

Howie Mandel, now into his eighth month as host of a syndicated talk-variety show, and his wife, Terry, have listed their Malibu retreat of five years at just under $4 million. "They're selling because he works 14 hours a day, and he has been to the beach eight nights in two years," said listing agent Jay Rubenstein of Coldwell Banker's Malibu West office. When Mandel, 43, isn't doing his show, he is often on the road as a comic.

With the summer tourist crush over, the beaches have become ours again. With the weather still pleasant--at least, in between El Nino's outbursts--this can be the best time of year to enjoy dining by the sea. I recently discovered a couple of beach restaurants that show the range of our seaside dining. They have quite different appeals. The Beach House in Laguna Beach is romantically gorgeous and ambitious; River's End in Seal Beach is humble and delightful.

Pining for a beach house this summer? Liza Utter, proprietress of the Beach House on West Channel Road just above Pacific Coast Highway, has one you can borrow for the evening, if you don't mind a few other guests. Come for a drink in the large, inviting bar, or stay for dinner. This beach house comes with a resident cook. She's Josie LeBalch, former chef at Remi, and more recently, Saddle Peak Lodge.

Sandra and Mel Peters once owned a vacation home in Little Whale Cove on the Oregon coast. Both loved the ocean and missed it long after they moved to Beverly Hills to raise their children. Years later, as empty nesters, they began to look for a second home on the California coast, "but there was nothing . . . to rent that was nice, and lots to buy were ridiculously high--$6, $7, $8 million," says Sandra, now a striking grandmother of six.

As heavy machines dragged away most of the remaining wreckage from a Southern Pacific train that derailed on a Ventura Freeway overpass, residents returned to the beach houses Saturday that they were forced to leave six days earlier. Truckers and crane operators, wearing only work clothes, speedily moved tons of twisted rail cars, avoiding the remaining hydrazine hot spots, which had been fenced off and covered with sand.

My getaway fantasy wouldn't go away. It wiggled its way into my consciousness every time I got stuck in traffic or pondered ugly tasks such as checkbook balancing. The more it resurfaced, the more appealing it seemed. I would drive north with my 12-year-old son Shaun, winding our way up the coast until the sky turned smogless. (OK, this part I stole from the Nissan commercial in which a harried mother drives to a bed and breakfast that has left the lights on for her.

Wanted: One survivalist with 11 friends and a checkbook. A 25-acre island in the Bahamas, which was developed as a secure sanctuary capable of sustaining 12 people with no outside contact for five years, will be auctioned on June 28. Expected sales price: $14 million. Leaf Cay Exuma was bought about 25 years ago by Jack N. Holcomb for the purpose of ...