Martha Mulholland's Malibu Fireplace Wall: What a Painting Owes a Sculptural Hood

♦ ♦ ♦ JULY 23, 2026 | 3 MIN READ Martha Mulholland's Malibu Fireplace Wall: What a Painting Owes a Sculptural Hood TLDR: In a Point Dume compound built for a “colorful, wild, seventies” brief, designer Martha Mulholland hung a Christopher Canullo painting on the one wall in the living room already occupied by a hand-modeled, Gaudí-inspired plaster fireplace hood. It’s a clean test case for what a painting has to do next to real sculpture . The fireplace hood in this Malibu living room isn’t tile or stone. It’s hand-troweled plaster, pulled up into a rounded, almost breathing shape that Martha Mulholland calls her own homage to Antoni Gaudí. I read about the house this week in Julie Belcove’s 1stDibs Introspective tour of the Point Dume compound, and the detail that stopped me wasn’t the hood itself. It was what’s hanging beside it, on the same wall: a painting by Christopher Canullo, sharing a sightline with a piece of architecture that behaves like sculpture. The house is a 6,000-square-foot Spanish Colonial compound built in phases starting in the 1950s. The brief, in the clients’ own words to Mulholland, was direct: “We want it Mexico City, colorful, wild, seventies, but also a beachcomber sixties Malibu vibe.” Mulholland pulled the old 1990s tiled hearth out entirely and replaced it with a floating shelf of antique brick, topped by the new plaster hood. A pair of 1970s brutalist iron-and-Murano-glass sconces flanks the fireplace wall. A spherical Noguchi Akari pendant hangs overhead. The room, in other words, is already full of curved, hand-worked, sculptural things before the painting ever enters it. Why a sculptural fireplace hood changes what a painting has to do A blank wall lets a painting set its own terms: its own geometry, its own temperature, its own claim on the room’s scale. A wall that already holds a curved plaster form doesn’t offer that silence. The painting arrives into a conversation that’s underway, and everything nearby, the Gaudí-style hood, the round Akari sphere, the Murano glass, the oak-and-rush curves of the vintage armchair, is speaking the same rounded, organic vocabulary. A canvas that tried to out-curve or out-texture that room would lose. It doesn’t have the material range plaster and hand-blown glass have. The one straight line in a room built from curves What a painting has that none of that sculpture has is a hard edge. A canvas is a rectangle, four true lines meeting at four true corners, and in a room this rounded, that stops being a limitation and becomes the entire argument for hanging one there. The eye needs something to check the curves against. Put a rectangle on that wall and it doesn’t compete with the fireplace hood’s shape, it gives the room a horizontal and a vertical to measure every other curve by. The painting’s job here isn’t to be the boldest object in the room. Plenty of things in this house already are. Its job is to hold its own edges while everything around it curves. A rectangle doesn’t