Reinvention × Restoration 

When you are young, talented, and in the pocket of the wave that’s about to propel your modest-board short company into a multibillion-dollar concern, you could be forgiven for thinking that summers are, in fact, endless. Steve Jones, though, recalls the exact moment he grasped that autumn will eventually arrive, even for Laguna Beach legends/Quiksilver wunderkinds. 

 “I remember when I first started working for Quiksilver and I was going to my first ASR show,” he says. “I was in my mid twenties. It was one of the first trade shows and I remember walking the aisles and seeing everything and it was like, are you kidding me? It was like heaven on earth or something. And I remember walking by this one booth and I saw this older guy hanging around the booth and I remember thinking to
myself, ‘What’s that old dude doing there?’ He was maybe in his late thirties.”

Twenty years later, trapped in a management meeting while the conference-room clock ticked backward, Jones suddenly flashbacked to that memory and realized he was overdue for a second act. 

 “I was sitting with eight people trying to decide whether it’s this color blue or that color blue. And you just get to a point where you don’t care and I was like, ‘Oh, my god. I totally turned into that guy.’ Trying to hold on. It was a little bit like, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I’m too old,’” Jones says, chuckling at the memory. “Also, I think there was this existential thing where it was like, ‘Does what I do even make a difference?’”

Tall, trim, and elegantly casual in his mid fifties, Jones shares this story from the safe distance of his immaculately restored, two-story Mediterranean Revival home in the tony Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. The heavy lifting involved knocking down walls, putting in archways, restoring the kitchen, adding French doors, redoing the floors, and digging the pool. “I touched every surface,” he says. 

The flea-market kitsch, thrift-store religiosities, and taxidermied menageries sprinkled throughout the house is Jones being Jones, balancing understated surf-culture themes with off-kilter eclecticism. “Ninety-five percent of the stuff in my home is from the Rose Bowl,” he jokes.

The tile work on the porticos, around the fireplace, and in the bathrooms would be recognizable to many of the Northeast Los Angeles hipsters who have engaged in bidding wars over his artisanal house flips, as would the stained-glass inlays and, perhaps, the well-placed Crottys, Friedkins, and Pettibons. Jones might not have put a Peter Schroff surfboard in the study, or parked a pristine, vintage microbus at the end of the driveway, but the surf-culture signifiers, however subtle, would be on display. They are a big part of what makes his properties move.

He originally eyed the property as an up-market move for Better Shelter, the boutique real estate and design firm he’s operated for a decade now. But after spending a few years and a small fortune on the house, Jones fell victim to his own good taste.  “I’ve worked on all these houses in all of these neighborhoods all over L.A. and you kind of fall in love with each one. You fall in love with the neighborhoods, but this one I really fell in love with.”

It’s a long way from the beach, but in his successful second act, Steve Jones has found that the beach can travel. 

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Steve Jones was one of the enfant terribles of the mid 80s who helped put Quiksilver on the cutting edge of a booming surf industry. Those were the days when Bob McKnight, Jeff Hakman, and Danny Kwock roamed the Costa Mesa headquarters, while kids from Canoga Park to Cleveland donned Ghetto Dog and Warpaint duds. 

Jones came up in Laguna with a single father in an apartment overlooking Thousand Steps. He surfed and skim-boarded the wedge at 10th Street while absorbing the contact high of Eternal Love before The Brotherhood went off the rails.

“Oh, my God, it was crazy,” says Jones. “My father was sort of peripherally involved with those guys. They had Rainbow Surfboards. They had this space above [the high-end hippy boutique] Visions and we used to go and look at all the airbrushed boards. They had this restaurant called Love Animals Don’t Eat Them and it was pay what you can afford—this sort of utopian, hippie, horrible food. We used to go there all the time. I hated it.”

The fertile Laguna Beach scene spawned future machers such as Michael Tomson, McKnight, Shawn Stüssy, Mossimo Giannulli, and others. Jones rode their wake. “My first creative gig was when Shawn Stüssy and Doug Bunting opened up this little surf shop called Equipe. They needed someone to do window displays and that was the start of it, but, of course, I didn’t know it at the time. It was sort of ground zero for that whole thing and this explosion of the surf industry. I got in early on. I was doing work for Mossimo and doing work for Gotcha and doing work for Shawn.”

Danny Kwock, whose Echo Beach bona fides fueled much of Quiksilver’s cutting-edge ethos back in the day, lured Jones into the insurgent company’s fold. Kwock remembers Jones standing out even amid the Laguna Beach scene’s creative clutter. “When people were zigging, he was zagging,” says Kwock. “He was always just spinning it in a total different way. That was his genius.”

Jones cut an equally iconoclastic figure in the water. “To me, he was an amazing surfer because he wasn’t a competitive surfer, he was a styler,” says Kwock. “The normal person on the beach wouldn’t see what I was seeing. I was seeing a guy who was on a shortboard, but his mind was on a longboard. He was feeling the water with every fingertip and the hair on his arms. He was timeless, an old soul coming from another era. I got his deal.”

Kwock also got that Jones had something else that made him unique. “Steve could use both sides of his brain. He could deliver,” says Kwock. “People see his creativity and quirkiness, but I had mad respect for the way he could handle himself as a businessperson and entrepreneur.” 

Jones contributed mightily to the visual language and branding that would communicate an aura of authenticity among Quiksilver’s core shops, consumers, and standard bearers such as Kelly Slater, Lisa Andersen and, later, Dane Reynolds. During his 20-year run, Quiksilver grew from a modest $60 million company to a $2.3 billion behemoth at its peak. 

The surf industry, though, is prone to booms and busts and this wave closed out in 2008. Quiksilver was slow to its feet in the aftermath of the financial crash and declared bankruptcy in 2015. By then, Kwock had long since cut bait. “When Danny left Quiksilver, it was like the soul went with him,” says Jones. 

Kwock’s departure left Jones, now approaching his mid forties, pondering how to spring himself from the gilded trap. The answer came when Tom Adler introduced Jones to a mutual friend, Pete Zehnder. In another life, Zehnder had been a garage-bound shaper, had cofounded Alva Skates, and even did some mineral-mining speculation. When he and Jones met, Zehnder was a budding real estate mogul with 12 bungalows in West Costa Mesa that he wasn’t quite sure what to do with. 

“By that time, I was living up in L.A. and I owned real estate and I was a landlord. I had a place in Laguna and I had a fourplex up in West Hollywood. I’d gone through the renovation process and that appealed to me,” says Jones. “I was like, ‘This is it. This is what I want to do.’”

Zehnder charged Jones with the design process for what they would call 1.7 Ocean, Costa Mesa’s first condo conversion. The real conversion, though, was taking the under-appreciated property and turning it into something coveted by Costa Mesa’s underserved creative class. 

“It was like, ‘God, you’ve got all these cool brands, and you’ve got all these cool people working for these cool companies. But where’s the cool housing?’” says Jones. “Pete and I took a lot of our cues from Quiksilver and these other brands. It was just taking some aspects of surf culture and applying that sort of sensibility to this very conservative industry called real estate.”

The houses sold in a snap and Jones decided to experiment with the same principles in eastside Los Angeles neighborhoods such as Silver Lake, Eagle Rock, and Highland Park where, after the 2008 crash, attractive housing stock could be found at bargain prices. 

“The first house was in Silver Lake—this was 2009, 2010. Prices were still going down, no one knew where the bottom was. So, we paid $250,000 for this house and we flipped it and we sold it for $500,000 and the open house was just mobbed and there was a little bit of a bidding war,” says Jones “We came in speaking to this demographic that was just being completely ignored. No one was addressing these hipsters, or whatever you want to call them.”

As gentrification pushed relentlessly north and east around Los Angeles, stressing once-affordable neighborhoods, some pointed to Jones’s surf-inflected flips, especially in Highland Park, as having paved the way for a sort of brohemian imperialism, whereby blithe hipsters remake working-class neighborhoods in their own artisanal images.  

Jones doesn’t see it quite like that. 

“People crave this authenticity and charm. A lot of the houses I do are these old cottages, bungalows, what have you, and for the people who buy my houses, it seems to be what they want,” he says. “I’ve developed this kind of visual language and it’s something that resonates with me personally. I do what I like and it’s struck a nerve with the people.

“I’m proud of the difference I’ve made and it goes back a little bit to the ‘what’s the point’ and the existential thing. Neighborhoods are always in flux, and I think that Highland Park is a lot nicer than it was. You have this collision of cultures where you do have these younger hipsters, or whatever, and you have this kind of more established Hispanic thing, and you’ve got the Hispanic thing next to the white thing next to the whatever, and that’s kind of what makes Highland Park friggin’ cool.”

Lately, that yearning for a more sophisticated beach-culture aesthetic in a design context has made Better Shelter a hot commodity for increasingly ambitious commercial projects such as the recently completed Lido Marina Village renovation in Newport Beach and Pacific City in Huntington Beach. Currently, Better Shelter is teaming up with one of the two large developers submitting designs for a proposed county-funded redevelopment of Dana Point Harbor. 

“You see the difference that design makes in a project. You want to do projects that are going to impact people,” says Jones. “You take a step back from that and look at surf culture and how much it influences and defines me and a lot of the people who came from that, and there’s so much to mine and to pull from.”