Adamson House: The Taj Mahal of Tile

While May Rindge was filing appeals in California courts over the Pacific Coast Highway, she was also running a ceramics factory on the beach of the property she was trying to protect. The two enterprises make a kind of portrait of her: the legal fighter and the industrialist, operating simultaneously on the same piece of Malibu shore.

Malibu Potteries opened in nineteen twenty-six. Rindge had discovered that the clay on her land had the right properties, and she hired a ceramist named Rufus Keeler to work out the glazes. What Keeler produced, working at the Malibu facility, were colors of unusual intensity, blues and greens and ochres that people compared to the finest European tilework. At peak production, the factory employed one hundred twenty-five workers and produced up to thirty thousand square feet of tile per month, supplying commissions for buildings across Southern California.

A fire in nineteen thirty-one, compounded by the Depression, ended it. The factory closed the following year. In the six years it operated, it produced some of the most admired ceramic work made in California in the twentieth century.

The Adamson House, built in nineteen twenty-nine for May Rindge's daughter Rhoda and her husband Merritt Adamson, is the fullest surviving showcase of what the factory made. The floors, walls, fountains, and garden surfaces of the house are covered in Malibu Potteries tile. The description that has been used for it, the Taj Mahal of tile, is not hyperbole in the way that phrase usually is. It is a house in which an industrial ceramic vision was applied at every available surface, by the people who invented that vision, at the moment of their greatest skill.

The house is now a California State Park and a National Register Historic landmark. It sits at the edge of the Malibu Lagoon, a hundred yards from the break where surfing became modern.