Villa de Leon

One of the best moments during a drive from Malibu to Santa Monica occurs a few minutes after the Mastro’s bend, at the traffic light just past Sunset Mesa. After uninterrupted miles of modern homes, a massive, genuinely old-looking Renaissance-y castle emerges into view, perched high above PCH on a giant seaside cliff.

Most out-of-towners assume the lavish castle is the Getty Villa (the real Getty Villa is located just up the hill from it on Coastline Dr.). But locals know– it is the random castle that is not the Getty Villa.

In fact, it has a name: Villa de Leon. And if it looks out of place on the eastern Malibu/Palisades border, that’s because Villa de Leon was here long before the rest of the city was. It is in face genuinely old, at least by L.A. standards, built in 1930 by Austrian industrialist Leon Kauffman for his wife.

The Pacific Coast Highway was still new back then and Malibu still largely rural, with open fields and towering coastal vistas that reminded Kauffmann of the Amalfi Coast. So much so, Kaufmann reasoned, the area might work as a passable substitute for the Italian summer villa he’d long promised his wife, Clemence.

Surprisingly, this idea went over alright at home. Kauffman soon bought a six-lot parcel of land in the new Castellammare neighborhood, and by the late 1920s had begun construction on his dream vacation home.

Renowned San Francisco-based architect Kenneth A. Macdonald, Jr. headed the home’s design, using a chapel in Versailles as inspiration in his plans for a palatial French Revival/Mediterranean villa. At 12,000 feet square feet, Villa de Leon was one of the largest estates in Southern California when it was completed in 1930. At a cost of $1 million, it was also one of the most expensive. Frequent travelers to Europe, the Kauffmans decorated their new home with a world-class collection of antiques from their voyages. Unfortunately, Leon and Clemence were only able to live in the completed home for a few years. Clemence died in 1933 at the age of 42, and Leon a few years later, at 62 years old.

The home has remained largely empty in the years since. A caretaker and his dog lived alone on the property for nearly twenty years after the Kaufmans’ passing before the home was sold at auction in the 1950s. Since then, it’s been handed off to a list of unlikely owners, from a Christian cult leader who required his parishioners to pay the mortgage, to a Pacific Palisades urologist. Currently Villa de Leon sits unoccupied, used mainly as a location for filming and photo shoots.

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