A hillside home above Zuma Beach has been named Sunset magazine's 2026 Idea House, and it belongs to Camille Styles — the Texas-born content creator and former event planner who has been publishing recipes, style and lifestyle advice since 2009. What makes the house interesting isn't just the design, but the story behind it: a six-year renovation that started as a vacation-home dream and turned into a permanent move to the California coast.
Styles and her husband, entrepreneur Adam Moore, spent two decades in Austin before deciding they wanted a slower pace. Malibu appealed for reasons that will sound familiar to anyone who has visited: farm stands, surf culture, easy access to nature. They found a 1950s beach house in a small neighbourhood above Zuma Beach — modest by local standards, set on a 28,562-square-foot lot with mature palms, a guest house and a vintage kidney-shaped pool — and got to work.
The project took far longer than expected. Permitting delays in Malibu stretched the early years out painfully, but the extra time shaped the result. Styles let her ideas mature, and the palette shifted from the all-white interiors she'd always lived with to a warmer, layered look with black-stained redwood siding and Japandi influences. Working with architect Doug Burdge, a Malibu specialist since 1987, the team added a 1,000-square-foot great room with an open kitchen and glass doors spilling onto a deck with Pacific views, and gut-renovated the original three-bedroom structure. The finished house has four bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms across 3,104 square feet.
Fire safety drove many of the decisions — a reality of building in the Santa Monica Mountains. Vaulted bedroom ceilings replaced attic space, treated decking with better venting keeps embers from getting trapped, heavy timber was used for the trellis to slow burn rates, and gravel xeriscape zones ring the house. Humboldt Sawmill redwood siding and a corrugated metal roof completed the fire-conscious exterior.
The indoor-outdoor flow is the real selling point: a built-in fire pit, concrete conversation area and wood-fired pizza oven near the kitchen make entertaining easy. Styles, who launched the homewares brand Casa Zuma three years ago, uses the house as a testing ground — pendant lights and tabletop pieces from her own line appear throughout.
The family sold their Austin home and moved to California in May, settling in just before the school year, with both kids' schools a five-minute walk away.
Why should a traveller care? Malibu has always traded on this exact appeal — the unhurried coastal lifestyle, Zuma Beach, roadside farm stands along Pacific Coast Highway. Sunset's Idea House tours are a long-running chance to peek inside homes you'd otherwise never see, and this one doubles as a case study in what coastal California living actually costs in patience and planning. If you're drawn to the area, the house is a good mood board for the relaxed, salty-air aesthetic the town is known for.
