The Santa Monica Conservancy is giving a party on Saturday, May 9, complete with live jazz, dessert and champagne, at the City’s new Annenberg Beach House.

Largely underwritten by an Annenberg Foundation grant, the Beach House opened last weekend.

Located at 415 Pacific Coast Highway, it combines the last surviving elements  of the historic Marion Davies estate — a guest house and a swimming pool, both of which have been scrupulously restored — with several new modern  buildings.

Commissioned by newspaper mogul  William Randolph Hearst and  designed by Julia Morgan, the elaborate estate was built on the site
In 1929 for Davies, Hearst’s longtime  mistress and a popular film star.
She sold the property to the state in 1947. Managed by the City, it was occupied initially by a hotel, and then, fot several decades,  by Doug Badt’s Sand and Sea Beach Club, until the City abruptly canceled the club’s lease in 1990.

Four years later, following the Northridge earthquake, the City red-tagged it, and shut it down. By the time work began on the Beach House,  it had been closed for more than a decade, and everything that remained in the site but the Davies pool and guest house was demolished.

The new buildings were designed by Frederick Fisher & Partners.

“The new Beach House is a showcase for how preservation and adaptive reuse can benefit the community,” said Conservancy president Carol Lemlein. “In addition, the Conservancy has created an informative guided tour program and has trained 75 volunteer docents who will lead tours of the Beach House.”

Free one-hour tours will be offered both on weekends and weekdays during this spring and summer with reduced hours in the fall and winter.

Tickets for the event are available at www.smconservancy.org. Admission to this kick-off party is $60 for the general public and $50 for members of the Conservancy. Parking is $8. Sponsors include Spectra and Preservation Arts.

To reserve for the Beach House party or find out more about docent-led tours, contact the Santa Monica Conservancy at (310) 496-3146 or visit www.smconservancy.org.