Barefoot on the beach

• Last Updated: July 24. 2009 10:28PM UAE / July 24. 2009 6:28PM GMT

The allure of the beach house, with its strictly defined personality – promoting a sense of escape without abandonment and of leisure without effort – surely tops the wish list of many of us.

Quite apart from any financial considerations that ownership of a beach home represents, it’s the emotional currency involved that sets it apart: “Since the mundanity of everyday life rarely crosses the threshold, owners tend to invest far more of themselves since, by definition, a beach house is geared to fun and relaxation,” says the New Zealand architect Julian Guthrie. “It’s the place people want to keep rather than trade up or down, as they do with their principal house. It will more often be the only property that passes through generations and helps to create cherished memories – it is the true family home.”

Hollywood’s enduring love affair with the beach house has undoubtedly helped build the appeal of the concept, making many striking examples as memorable as the actors who were filmed around them. From A Summer Place, where a teenage romance between the 1950s sweethearts Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee blossomed around Frank Lloyd Wright’s fabulous modernist house on the beach in Carmel, to the traditional clapboard Laguna Beach cottage owned by Barbara Hershey’s ailing character in Beaches, and the minimalist splendour in which an apoplectically nervous Julia Roberts resided in Sleeping with the Enemy (a beach house that was built for the movie then torn down), audiences can’t help looking at these properties and yearning for the sheer glamour of them – leaving aside the psychotic spouses that go with the storylines. It’s an image with powerful resonance – even here, where beach houses are a rarity.

Although, of course, coastal dwellings have existed since man emerged from the cave, the beach house as a lifestyle concept exploded in the early decades of the 20th century, when an emerging middle class sought temporary reprieve from its industrialised cities. A place near the water provided the perfect retreat. At first they camped, then gradually they built more permanent – yet still simple – structures from local timber, the outdoor covered porch being the most important “room” in the house.

However, as the bourgeoisie’s desire for social superiority grew, the notion of beach house as status symbol emerged (sending the price of beachfront property soaring) and over-designed confections, with no reference whatever to climate, location, or topography became increasingly fashionable – the “cottages” of New York’s elite in Newport, Rhode Island being an extreme example.

“The ‘wedding cake’ architecture found in many beach communities in this country, in places such as The Hamptons and Florida, typifies that complete lack of thought to the sense of place,” says the Miami-based architect Luis Pons. “It completely misses the importance of the elements and that blurring of the indoors and outdoors that should be at the centre of beach house architecture.”

So disillusioned was the Venezuelan-born Pons with the pretentious design that prevailed in his adoptive city, that during Art Basel Miami in 2003, he unveiled the inflatable installation, Floating Villa, as a response to the local real estate boom where, he felt, architectural fantasy had given way to predictable seaside McMansions and uninspired excess.

Pons wishes that more designs would take their cues from Latin America, where a simpler, more organic style of beach architecture prevails. “It is the architect’s job to encourage building in indigenous materials, such as local woods, stone or stucco. The more natural the build, the better the building flows and ultimately, the better the beach house. I just get so frustrated when so many people get it so wrong.”

There could be much shuffling of feet in UAE developers’ offices at that statement but there are notable exceptions. Nakheel has deviated from the urban-style architecture of its man-made beach community on Palm Jumeirah with the design of 504 Water Homes planned for Palm Jebel Ali. With timber frames and large areas of glass, the simply designed three-bedroom homes will, hopefully, imbue their residents with a true sense of beach living when they move in from 2011 onwards.

Nearing completion on Jumeirah Beach is an all-white feet-in-the-sand apartment complex that could have been lifted straight from Santa Monica.

In Abu Dhabi, pavilion-like over-water homes are taking shape in Al Gurm. Elsewhere, prominent local families have taken to the capital’s islands for their weekend retreats – in one case building a whimsical Robinson Crusoe-like structure on stilts over the water, with rope bridges to complete the escapist fantasy. It may be largely clad in faux timber-effect fibreglass but full marks for individuality and maintaining a sense of closeness to the elements.

In Australia and New Zealand the traditional “barefoot” spirit of the beach house has remained largely intact even in the hands of contemporary architects – but that doesn’t mean they don’t like to have fun occasionally. The Klein Bottle House designed by the Melbourne architecture firm, McBride Charles Ryan, and built on the coast just outside the city, takes it name from (of all things) a theory in topological mathematics. But to the layman it’s an extremely graphic beach house that curves upon itself with no real distinction between “inside” and “outside” – a comforting relationship, say the designers, to the tradition of the Aussie cement-sheet beach house.

In New Zealand Julian Guthrie’s reinterpretation of the classic Kiwi seaside “bach” (pronounced “batch”) – most notably at Pauanui and on Omaha Beach – truly captures the spirit of the original shacks, which were rudely constructed from reclaimed planks, with salvaged window frames and roofs of corrugated iron sheeting. “Clients still have a real desire for designs similar to the original bach,” he says. “While the designs may be more sophisticated, there’s still a move to sliding glass doors instead of a conventional entrance and a very relaxed layout, with flooring that flows into the outdoor spaces.”

Across the Pacific Ocean in Orange County, California, a place that’s no stranger to overblown beach architecture, there’s a dawning realisation that maybe the first beach house generations got it right all along. Crystal Cove Cottages, a ramshackle community of 46 cottages on the southern Californian coast enjoyed its heyday in the 1930s, when residents spent leisurely summer days sunbathing on the sand and clam-baking – and where the cocktail flag was raised each afternoon at four o’clock as the trumpet sounded. “Every night was Saturday night, and Saturday night was New Year’s Eve,” recalled Stella Hiatt, a former resident, in the book Crystal Cove Cottages: Islands in Time on the California Coast.

In 1979 the State of California bought the land and the cottages fell into sorry disrepair. But, thanks to serious lobbying by former residents and their descendants, 22 of them have been returned to something approaching their original jaunty states and made available for rental. In April 2006, less than an hour after ReserveAmerica opened its online booking system for Crystal Cove, 16,000 people tried to book one of the 13 available cottages. More cottages, most of which sit at the base of the bluff (which neatly hides a row of identikit McMansion-style homes built beyond it) will be renovated in the future – including the two-storey brown shingle cottage where Beaches was filmed.

Beach landscapes are often not the gentle, sun-dappled, wave-bobbing perfection of Crystal Cove, however, and architects strive to allow for the frequent extremes of coastal weather. Guthrie’s sleek design set among the dunes of blustery Omaha Beach protects its inhabitants from both the elements and prying eyes with the clever use of aluminium louvres which, when closed, give the house full protection from both the weather and intruders. “As the house is very near a public walkway, even when the louvres are open they allow the occupants a full view of outdoors without their own privacy being compromised,” explains Guthrie.

Tropical House, by the New York-based architect Dror Benshetrit, takes a similar approach, with its staggeringly simple cuboid shape covered with modular wall panels that literally become the hatches that batten down to protect it from inclement tropical weather. When the sun is shining, those same panels fold out on the upper level transforming the first floor into a breezy open-air pavilion. “It fulfils that element of moving with the environment that I feel is important in any beach house design,” says the architect.

One wonders what Benshetrit first thought when approached by Zaya, the developer behind Nurai, a billion-dollar island development in Abu Dhabi. His brief, he says, was quite open: simply to make the most of the unspoilt island and its crystalline waters – oh yes, and to create homes that would offer some of the world’s most discerning and wealthy buyers the ultimate beach escape: “It was a real paradox,” he recalls. “How do you offer the intense experience that was required, yet retain an overwhelming sense of privacy and calm?”

Fifty-one of the houses Benshetrit designed for Nurai will be over-the-water homes – simple timber-and-glass pavilions set on stilts. Despite the luxury of their interiors and amenities, they will sit well with the slightly Maldivian “virgin island” feel of Nurai. The conundrum came with the design of the 31 “estates”, each of which has its own beach frontage. Staying true to his own design ideals – which, fortunately, coincided with those of the developer – Benshetrit adopted a strategy of camouflage: “I started thinking about what makes this region famous globally. The Middle East is well known for its carpets – which are also useful for picking up and hiding things under. That had to be the way forward.”

To conceal the mass of the 14,000-square-foot homes, Benshetrit designed a “carpet” of lawn that unfolds across the island, its sweeping curves and undulations concealing the structures of the beach estates underneath. “The effect undermines those hard linear elements – features that are alien to an organic and traditional landscape,” he explains. “The estates now make a direct connection with sea and the beach and it is the estates’ view and location that takes prominence. Despite being fantastic buildings, they don’t dominate from the land, the sea or the air.”

Benshetrit says that, from the start, he felt there was a need to push the boundaries – and in doing so took the concept of the beach house back to its rightful place.

As Pons says: “It’s almost as if what you don’t build becomes more important. Beach house architecture has to be honest and it has to be restricted. Above all it has to reflect the real meaning of luxury: which now is freedom and time.”