From their wraparound redwood deck, Sally and Ron Zamarin have a clear view of the white water at Zuma Beach directly below, the dolphins out in the Pacific and even the West Channel Islands.
Nestled in a private, gated 93-acre community, the Zamarins` new home is a cocoon of seafoam green with three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a walk-in wine cellar, skylights and Mexican tile floors.
In Malibu, it might be just another beach house, except that it happens to be a triple-wide mobile home, model year 1970.
A year ago the Zamarins paid $250,000 for their mobile home in the Point Dume Club, a mobile-home park in the lap of Malibu luxury. It was the highest price ever paid at the park, said Bill Wood, the park`s manager. And the Zamarins said they were paying even more than that to renovate their mobile home.
Some of the 297 homes of this quiet, well-manicured community, where the black asphalt is so smooth it would make a perfect roller-skating surface (if roller-skating were allowed), look like the mobile homes in any other trailer park. But many do not, sometimes because of elaborate renovations, sometimes because the carport houses a Mercedes, a Maserati or a Rolls-Royce.
”This place is the best-kept secret in town,” said Jim Baltutis. He has what he calls a ”killer” view of the Santa Monica Mountains from the second- story deck of his mobile home, which, as a single-wide unit and manages a rock band, is part of an influx of young people to Point Dume (pronounced du- MAY) in the last two years. Before then, they would not have looked twice at the 20-year-old park, since it was limited to people 45 and older and considered a retirement community.
Things changed in March, 1989, when the park opened its doors to people of all ages to avoid meeting new, more stringent federal regulations on limiting mobile-home parks to older adults.
Partly as a result, mobile homes that would sell for $30,000 to $60,000 elsewhere go for $100,000 to $250,000 here, said Wood, whose office in the clubhouse looks out on an immaculately landscaped pool and Jacuzzi.
In addition to the cost of the mobile home, residents lease the ground it rests on. The fee-$650 to $1,300 a month-is based on whether the site has a view of the Santa Monica Mountains or the Pacific Ocean. These ground-rent leases run for five years.
The Point Dume Club may be the ultimate expression of the old real-estate adage, ”Location, location, location.”
”A mobile home is a mobile home whether it`s in Victorville or Redwood City,” said Wood, who has worked in mobile-home parks in less glamorous places. ”But the fact that you`re in Malibu, no nd the smallest house goes for $500,000.
The Point Dume Club, on the other hand, allows Californians to live near the beach in Malibu for much, much less, said Jack Evans, who walks his Lhasa apso, Buddy, near the thick rows of lush ferns that line the driveway of the double-wide unit that he shares with his wife, Deirdre.
Upscale mobile home parks appear to be peculiar to California.
”Treasure Island in South Laguna Beach is the one other oceanfront mobile-home park more costly than the Point Dume Club, where rents go up to $2,500 a month,” said William T. Dawson, a mobile-home-park developer based in California. ”I know of no other places in the United States where this condition exists. It`s an aberration here in California.
”For anyone to be able to enjoy an oceanfront residence for under a million dollars, that`s a bargain,” Dawson added.
Like the Evanses, the Zamarins have long wanted to live near the beach. The couple, who are in their mid-50s, decided to move after their four children left home.
Although their 2,700-square-foot mobile home is the largest unit at the Point Dume Club, it would easily fit on the tennis court of the property in Encino they recently sold, said Sally Zamarin. She admitted that she probably cares too much about what other people think and still chokes on the term
”mobile home park”; she prefers to say that she lives in a beach house.
But living in a mobile-home park does not appear to bother her relatives. Last year, after the Zamarins bought their mobile home, which has an enormous magnolia tree out front, Zamarin`s sister, Peggy Khoury, and her husband, Joseph, also bought in the park. They were also joined by the sisters`
recently widowed mother, Margaret Zamarin, whose triple-wide unit was big enough to seat 26 relatives and friends for Thanksgiving dinner last month.
Just up the hill and around the bend from the Zamarins the other day, painters were recently brushing a final coat of white paint on the thick stucco walls in Susan Cotton`s mobile home.
Cotton, a former actress who now designs homes (this is her first mobile one, however), has spent close to $200,000 turning a 1972 24-foot-wide unit into a 1,800-square-foot Cape Cod cottage, making her home a little larger than the average home in the park, which is about 1,300 square feet.
Cotton and her contractor, Tim Lankford, have rounded corners and plastered the walls, and added a white Gaggenau stove and a Sub-zero refrigerator. Although Cotton`s friends with big houses in Beverly Hills think her mobile home is quaint, she intends to make this her permanent residence.
”It`s safe and friendly,” she said. ”It has the feeling of a little community.”
For Mark and Josephine Madison, who have a 3-year-old daughter, the appeal of the park was less crime and less congestion than they faced in their old neighborhood in North Hollywood.
Last summer, the Madisons bought their first home, a double-wide fixer-upper for $120,000. They have spent the last six months remodeling the mobile home, which was completely gutted, and have yet to move in.
Madison, who is 6 feet 2 inches tall, recently stood in the empty space where the shower will be, demonstrating that they need a bigger shower stall or he will hit his elbows on the glass.
One thing that disturbs some residents is the size of ground-rent increases. ”When we moved in, we paid $160 a month rent,” said Paul Pierce, 80; he and his wife, Mary, were the first residents when the park opened in 1969. ”Ours is now up to $1,000.”
As he flipped through a scrapbook of clippings from the days when he was one of Los Angeles` first helicopter traffic reporters, he noted that ”a lot of wealthy people are moving in and some old-timers are having to move out.” About half of the mobile homes are occupied by people who moved in before the Point Dume Club lifted its age requirement.
Evans, who said he wished he owned his home site, asserted that when his rent, now $750, reaches $1,000, he will consider leaving. But Evans, who has lived at the park for 10 years, said it would be hard to give up the swimming pool, which is kept at 80 degrees year-round, and the small-town feeling of the pancake (and Bloody Mary) breakfasts that are held a few times a year.
While his double-wide unit has more than doubled in value from the $72,000 it cost 10 years ago, he said that other types of property had shown greater appreciation.
For example, the ocean-view condominiums just outside the park gates were $150,000 10 years ago and now cost more than $500,000.
There have always been some people who used their mobile home in the park as a second house at the beach. Carl Scott, a senior vice president of artist relations at Warner Brothers Records who works with singers such as Madonna, Prince and k.d. lang, said that the unit he bought for $71,000 two years ago meant the only way he could afford a getaway at the beach.
His primary residence in Pasadena is a carriage house on what was once Gen. George S. Patton`s estate.
Scott has spent about $20,000 to upgrade his mobile home. He added a wraparound deck, large windows for more striking views of the ocean, white Berber carpet and drywall where there once was vinyl. ”It`s very open, like being in a loft,” he said.
In the hope of trading up, Scott has just put his mobile home on the market for $225,000, more than three times what he paid for it. He intends to take the profits and buy a duplex on the beach below.
”I`m going to miss the place a lot,” Scott said. ”I really love it, except in a storm or earthquake. Then it feels like you`re in a can. In a recent small earthquake, it rattled, banged, squeaked, rumbled. Then you knew you were in a mobile home.
”But,” he added quickly, ”I never called it a mobile home. I always called it a cottage.”
