The Beams Stay: Philippe Naouri and an Edward Fickett House in Malibu

The house on Filaree Heights is a long, low pavilion under exposed black beams, with glass on every garden side. Its structure shows before its rooms do: inside, white walls sit under dark beams, and the house reads largely as those lines.

The beams are the reason the house matters. It is by Edward Fickett, an architect whose name is better known to preservationists than to the public, and the choice made here, to keep the original beams while remaking much of what surrounds them, is more interesting than a routine renovation.

The architect of fifty thousand houses

Fickett was born in 1916, a fourth-generation Angeleno and the son of a contractor, and was a Navy veteran. The Los Angeles Conservancy credits him with designing 50,000 homes or more in postwar Southern California, among them some 10,000 in the San Fernando Valley in the 1950s alone. He served as architectural adviser to President Eisenhower, served on the Federal Housing Advisory Board for the Federal Housing Administration, and was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1969.

Typical features of his tract homes, the Conservancy notes, were open, L-shaped floor plans, glass walls and playful rooflines, and part of his skill was designing for land that many considered unbuildable. He was so prolific that many homeowners do not know they live in a Fickett house. His Jacobson House in Los Feliz became Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 674 in 2000.

A Fickett house is a system before it is a style. The structure is exposed and regular, the walls are infill, the glass fills what the walls do not. That is what makes it legible, and what makes it fragile: box in one beam to hide a duct, add a wall across one bay, and the logic that holds the house together starts to disappear.

What was kept, and what was added

Philippe Naouri, a French designer who began in vintage clothing, now restores Mid-Century Modern houses. At Filaree Heights, the 2024 sale listing describes a renovation that honors Fickett’s Mid-Century Modern vision and keeps a corridor of original beams. The beams still set the rhythm of the house, with glass on every garden side.

Around that frame the studio worked in the secondary layer. White walls and dark beams meet inside; slatted wood lines the hall and the bedrooms; a stone fireplace is sunk into the living room; ipe decks run out to the lawn.

The grounds are arranged the way the house is: as places opening in turn. A pond runs along the terrace, a fire pit sits in the lawn, and paddle and tennis courts lie beyond. The garden installation was by Double Green Landscapes.

A second author

There is a question every project like this raises, and it should be put plainly. A house reworked this thoroughly is a new interior inside an old frame. The slatted wood, the palette and the furniture are Naouri’s rather than Fickett’s. Whether that is preservation or a sympathetic second authorship depends on whether one sees a Mid-Century Modern house as an artifact to be fixed in time or as a system meant to be lived in and adjusted.

Filaree Heights makes a good case for the second view. The frame is intact and readable, the additions sit where a frame house can absorb them, and the house works as a place to live rather than a period set. Forbes Global Properties profiled Naouri’s work in May 2021, in an article on restored Mid-Century Modern houses in Los Angeles.

The argument is clearest in the structure itself: black beams over white planes, glass on every garden side, a frame standing in a Malibu garden.