CALIFORNIA ARCHITECT STUDIED WIND, SUN SEEKING INSPIRATION

To design a great house, California architect Harry Gesner believed, you needed to spend time at the property, not at the drawing board. While working on a home for one of his high-profile clients — a logging baron, a swimsuit magnate, a Hollywood legend with eight Oscar nominations to his name — he would spend hours at the site, studying the wind and sun and seeking inspiration from the view.

For a Malibu beach house he was designing in the 1950s, he took to the sea, paddling out on his surfboard to examine the property from a spot beyond the wave break. From there he made the initial drawings for what became his most famous building, the Wave House, using a grease pencil to sketch its curving, wavelike roof directly onto his longboard.

Gesner’s designs were variously inspired by the shape of a sand castle, the wings of a bird and the scales of a fish. Their unorthodox appearance ref lected the adventurous spirit of an architect who once romanced actress June Lockhart while performing water-skiing stunts on Lake Arrowhead, and who later survived the D-Day invasion of Normandy with help from a surfing technique, duck diving, that he used to avoid enemy fire while making his way onto Omaha Beach.

Over the years, Gesner also worked as a deckhand on actor Errol Flynn’s yacht, searched for ancient artifacts in Ecuador, hunted for the grave of conquistador Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo and tinkered with inventions, designing a Kentucky processing plant in the 1960s that turned waste into fertilizer, and converting his 1957 Mercedes convertible into an electric car more than five decades after he bought it.

But mainly he designed homes, seeking to create environmentally friendly houses that served as a source of joy, not just as shelter. To that end, he often added surprises to his buildings: For the Scantlin House, located at what is now the Getty Center in Los Angeles, he designed a lap pool that stretched nearly 100 feet, culminating in a waterfall that concealed an underwater passage leading to the home’s master bathroom.

“You come around a corner, look down into an alcove and see something that pleases you ... it takes the drudgery and dullness out of life,” he once told the Los Angeles Times, explaining his fondness for the unexpected flourish.

Gesner was 97 when he died June 10 at the Sandcastle, the mushroom-shaped home he built for himself in Malibu, right next door to the Wave House. The cause was cancer, said his stepson, Casey Dolan.

Although he took commissions all around the country, Gesner was best known for his mid-century designs in Southern California, which often featured curved walls, floor-to-ceiling windows and natural materials such as Santa Barbara fieldstone and bird’s-eye maple.