Malibu Colony Homes for Sale

Malibu, CA

Why People Move to Malibu Colony

The original Malibu. This is the stretch the rest of it grew out of. May Rindge laid it out in the 1920s and leased the lots to film people, and the address has meant the same thing ever since.
A manned gate. The Colony runs twenty-four-hour guarded security on the only road in. Nothing else on this coastline is both beachfront and watched around the clock.
The houses face the water, not the street. They turn their backs on the road and open onto the sand, which is why you can be inside one and have no sense of a neighborhood behind you at all.
You can walk out of the gate and have dinner. The Civic Center shops and restaurants are at the end of the road, and Carbon Beach and the pier are a few minutes east. Almost no other gated beachfront in Malibu lets you leave the car at home.

Rindge built it on three ideas, privacy, luxury and a view, and then chose who got in. The stars she leased to, Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, Gary Cooper and Bing Crosby among them, arrived to seaside cottages, and the place was soon nicknamed the Malibu Beach Motion Picture Colony, which is where the name comes from. The family company went bankrupt in the 1930s and building along this coast stalled, then a second wave of Hollywood money arrived in the 1940s and 1950s and started putting up the houses you see now.

Living in Malibu Colony

Surfrider Beach is next door. The most famous right-hand point break in California breaks a few minutes east of the gate, and you can watch it work from the sand without joining the crowd on it.
You can see both ends of the bay. South past Santa Monica to the Palos Verdes headland, north to the Point Dume bluffs. On a clear evening the whole arc of the bay lights up across the water.
Everything daily is at the end of the road. The Civic Center and the Lumber Yard hold the groceries, the coffee and the restaurants, and they are a walk rather than a drive down the highway.
The sand out front is yours to use all day. Not a path down a bluff and not a parking hunt. You open a door and you are on it, which is the single thing Colony owners say they miss when they leave.
Malibu Lagoon and the pier. Birdwatching on the lagoon, the pier for a walk and a meal over the water, and the Adamson House tilework next to it, all within a few minutes of the gate.

Schools here are still part of Santa Monica-Malibu Unified, but the separation that gives Malibu its own district has now been ratified on both sides. Check where a given address lands while the handover is under way.

Neighborhoods Around Malibu Colony: Malibu Road, Carbon Beach and the Civic Center

The Colony has no sub-areas inside it. It is one gate, one road and two rows of houses, so the geography that matters to a buyer is what it backs onto.

The front row, on the sand: the houses with the beach as the back garden. Narrow lots, wide frontage, and the water directly off the deck.
The second row, behind it: the landside houses, which trade the direct sand for a short walk to it. The same gate, the same guard, a different price and a different daily experience.
Malibu Road, immediately east: the Colony's back gate is its western end, and the road runs from there to Webb Way. Oceanfront houses on Puerco Beach, no guard gate, and the bluffs behind the inland side.
The Civic Center, at the far end of that road: where the shopping, the market and most of the restaurants are. This is the part of Malibu the Colony walks to.
Carbon Beach, past the pier: the other trophy beachfront address in this part of Malibu, and the one most Colony buyers also look at. No gate there, and a different kind of privacy.

Those three beachfront addresses, the Colony, Malibu Road and Carbon Beach, are usually shopped against each other. The thing that separates this one is the guard on the gate.

Homes for Sale in Malibu Colony

Big houses on tight lots. They began as leased cottages. When the leases ran out the residents bought the land under them and then built out, adding floors, pools and tennis courts on parcels that were drawn for beach shacks.
Old bones and new money, side by side. A restored 1930s cottage can sit next door to a glass-and-steel rebuild, and from the road you often cannot tell which is which.
Two kinds of house behind one gate. A front-row house on the sand and a second-row house behind it are different purchases. Decide which one you actually want before you start looking, because they rarely come up at the same time.
You are paying for the guard. A staffed gate on a beachfront street is the rare thing here, and it is why the Colony holds its own against beaches with more sand and bigger lots. Our Carbon Beach guide walks through how the trophy beachfront market actually trades.
Almost nothing comes up. A handful of houses change hands behind the gate in a typical year and plenty of them never reach the open market, so watch what is for sale along this stretch of coast rather than waiting on the Colony alone.

If the Colony is genuinely where you want to be, the move is to be known to the people who hear first, well before a listing appears.

Buying in Malibu Colony with a Malibu Realtor

Beach or behind it, restored cottage or new build: inside one gate there are more decisions than the address suggests. Reach out to Shen Realty and we will tell you what has actually traded behind that gate and what is likely to move next. We have sold on this coastline for almost 30 years, out of Sotheby's International Realty.

Common Questions About Malibu Colony

Is the beach at Malibu Colony private?

Partly, and the split surprises people. Every beach in the state is public below the high-tide line, so anyone may walk the water's edge in front of these houses. The gate controls the road, the houses and the dry sand behind them. What keeps the stretch quiet is that there is nowhere to park and no public stairway inside the Colony, so people arrive on foot from Surfrider and the lagoon. Our guide to private versus public sand sets out exactly where that line falls and what an easement across it means.

What does "the original Malibu" actually mean?

That this was the first residential address in Malibu, not simply an early one. The Rindge family owned the land and the Colony is the piece they opened up first, in the 1920s. Everything else on this coast was subdivided afterwards.

How does the guard gate work?

There is one road in and it is staffed around the clock, so visitors, deliveries and contractors are announced rather than waved through. It is the practical difference between the Colony and the open beachfront streets on either side of it, and it is most of what owners are paying for.

Where does Malibu Colony start and stop?

It is a single run of beachfront west of the Malibu Lagoon and the pier, with its back gate at the western end of Malibu Road. The houses sit in two rows, one on the sand and one behind. There are no interior enclaves or tracts, so an address is either inside the gate or it is not.

Is it hard to insure a house on the sand here?

It takes more work than an inland house, and it is the cost buyers tend to underestimate. Beachfront in Malibu sits in both fire country and the surf zone, so some carriers price it high and others decline it, and owners often end up with one policy for the house and a second for what the first will not take. Get a quote on the exact address early rather than once you are in escrow.

How does it compare with Carbon Beach and Malibu Road?

They are the three addresses buyers at this level cross-shop. Carbon Beach has the deepest sand and the biggest names, Malibu Road has the longest run of oceanfront and no gate, and the Colony has the history and the guard. We cover all three as part of our Malibu region.