AD Visits: Patrick Dempsey at His Malibu Home

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It's great to be here today with Architectural Digest.

To be a part of this shoot, it's like a dream come true.

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It's a Frank Gehry home, and it was really an artist's loft.

It was built in the late 60s, early 70s.

I'm very fortunate to be, really a caretaker of this house.

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The house is remarkable and it changes during the course

of the day because of the light

and how the light plays a big, big part

of the aesthetic.

When I first got the house, I thought it was really

important to reach out to talk to Frank Gehry

and to get his experience of making the house

and why he designed it and all that,

and invited him up to have a drink

and we were having a party,

and he sat up in the upper loft and he said,

This is my favorite spot.

And this was a big, big transition for him

because it was his first time to really build a home,

not a home, but a studio, the way he wanted to.

And certainly the chose of material,

with the corrugated tin, was revolutionary at the time.

It started off with a small little horse shed,

and they took that idea and ran with it

and they expanded it.

The notion is that the interior can change,

for the need of the artist,

or whoever is working in here,

but the exterior will stay the same.

My favorite part of this room is really the wood.

It has a practical reason as well,

because it's so loud in here,

because of the Italian plaster and the kids,

once it all gets ramped up and the volume gets really high,

it can be deafening.

So this helps to sort of bring it down

and help to quiet the house.

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It was never really designed for a family.

So you have to make modifications.

But what's great about it is,

you know where everybody is in the house

at any one given moment,

so there's no separation.

You don't lose your kids or you lose anybody.

Which is nice, I like the intimacy,

even with the great volume that you have here.

Trying to design and decorate a house like this

is very, very challenging,

because I think it looks great with nothing in it.

But you want to be comfortable

and you want it to be warm.

And I think sometimes, with a lot of modern homes,

they look great, but they're not warm.

You don't want to sit down, and this is a family home

and we want it to be inviting, and comfortable and casual

and relaxed, so you're not uptight about things,

especially with kids, you just can't worry about

things getting stains on them or things like that.

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Well because this is an artist's loft,

I think it inspires a lot of people to be creative,

and it's nice to see this space being used in that way.

And certainly with the kids up in the loft,

where they're painting or sculpting,

it's really nice to see,

it's really what this house is about.

It's about creativity, and people that come through,

the artists that come through,

it's nice to see them get inspired by it,

and they inspire us as well.

And then the land is another important thing,

is really to be connected to the land.

I grew up in the country, and I think that's really

when you find your center is outside in the land

and interacting with the trees and the plants

and the animals, certainly.

We have four mini donkeys.

Easter, Westin, Sticks, and Mable.

A tortoise named Clover.

A pig named Hank, two goats,

and tons of chickens.

And three dogs.

So it's good, it's nice that they kids have this,

and have this space that's protected.

And they can go off and have their private time

and explore on their own.

And my daughter Tallulah has really embraced the garden

and spends a lot of time up there,

either cutting flowers or cutting the vegetables,

and then bringing them down and cooking.

I think that, to me, gives me so much satisfaction,

to know that she's doing that.

And it's fun here, like I said,

you're a caretaker of a house,

and you have to be very careful to

nurture it and sustain it and hand it on

to someone else eventually.

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