Point Dume

Point Dume is the headland that closes off the northern end of Santa Monica Bay, about 20 miles west of Santa Monica on Pacific Coast Highway. Instead of one row of houses squeezed between PCH and the sand, you get flat marine terraces above the water, wide enough to hold a real grid of residential streets.

It feels nothing like the Malibu people picture from the highway. The streets are quiet, many have no sidewalks, and lots of about an acre are common. On a clear day you can see down to the Palos Verdes Peninsula and across to Santa Catalina Island, and at night it's dark.

The name goes back to 1793, when George Vancouver charted this coast and named the point for Padre Francisco Dumetz of Mission San Buenaventura. His map spelled it "Dume", nobody corrected it, and the neighborhood has carried the misspelling ever since.

Malibu itself is a young city on an old coast. It didn't incorporate until 1991. The land underneath was the 13,000-acre Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit, which passed to Frederick Hastings Rindge in 1891. His widow, May Rindge, fought a long court battle to keep a railroad off the ranch, opened Malibu to development in 1926 starting with the Colony, and died penniless. The state won its case and built what's now Pacific Coast Highway in 1929, and everything Malibu became followed from that road.

I'll say this plainly because it decides deals. The November 2018 Woolsey Fire burned homes on Point Dume and destroyed 465 homes across the City of Malibu, by the city's count. Rebuilding was slow: three years later only 55 homes had been rebuilt, and by late 2025, seven years on, about 45% of the 465 had a certificate of occupancy. Some owners were held up for years by permitting, including a case where widening a driveway to meet fire code ran into an environmentally sensitive habitat area.

The two large fires since then burned east of the point. The Franklin Fire in December 2024 burned 4,086 acres around Pepperdine and destroyed 20 structures. The January 2025 Palisades Fire burned 23,448 acres and destroyed 6,845 structures, 720 of them inside Malibu by the city's count, in the eastern part of the city. State fire maps have long rated Point Dume, like nearly all of Malibu, a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone.

KQED reported in August 2026 that about half the homes in some high fire-risk areas, Malibu among them, are now insured through the California FAIR Plan, the state's insurer of last resort. The Department of Insurance approved an average FAIR Plan increase of 29.1% on new and renewal policies starting 15 October 2026, and KQED reported some wildfire premiums will double. The FAIR Plan covers fire and caps a home at $3 million per location, so on a bigger Point Dume house you layer other policies on top, plus a separate one for liability, theft, and water damage.

None of this makes Point Dume a bad purchase. But I start every Point Dume search with insurance and fire history, not the view. Get a written quote on the specific address before you're emotionally committed.

Point Dume isn't walkable the way a beach town is. There's a small shopping strip where Heathercliff Road meets PCH, with Lily's and Le Café de la Plage, but groceries mean a drive: about 3 miles west to Trancas Country Market or about 8 miles east to the Civic Center and the Malibu Country Mart.

Everything regional depends on Pacific Coast Highway. PCH carries about 40,500 vehicles a day at summer peaks, and it's the only practical route in and out. Summer weekends, crashes, slides, and fire closures all land on the same road, so plan trips to Santa Monica or the Westside around it rather than counting on a fixed drive time.

For families, the public elementary school is on the point itself. Malibu Elementary on Fernhill Drive opened in 2019 when the district merged Point Dume Marine Science School and Juan Cabrillo Elementary onto the Point Dume campus.

Coastal permitting is the first surprise. Much of Malibu sits in the California Coastal Zone, and remodels, additions, and even some landscaping can need review beyond a normal city permit. If your plan depends on adding square footage, price the approval process before you assume it. The same goes for a second unit: the state's SB 9 law says outright that it doesn't lessen the Coastal Act, so a second house built under SB 9 still goes through coastal review.

Then there's septic. Point Dume homes generally run on septic rather than sewer, and water pressure, private roads, and shared driveway agreements vary parcel to parcel. If you're thinking about a guest house or an ADU, have a septic engineer tell you whether the system can take the extra load before you count on it.

Beach access is the last one. Some Point Dume properties carry rights to private beach access and some don't, and that difference is worth real money. It's also a recurring source of local dispute, so get exactly what's deeded to the property in writing rather than relying on what a listing implies.