Floor to ceiling sliding glass doors were added to let in light and open up the living and dining areas to the ocean view. The terra-cotta bust is Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's La Negresse. The carved wood chair in the foreground is made of ash; the low tables are shellstone.

Bush-hammered to give it a sponge-like texture, Texas shellstone was stacked asymmetrically in blocks to form low tables; for the dining table and entrance hall console, broken-edge limestone was embedded with seashells. The furniture throughout is wood and stone, softened by textured hand-woven fabric from Mexico or, in the case of the dining chairs, five dollar a yard canvas slipcovers, made in two sets so they can be easily cleaned. As a benefits a performer who is often on tour or in the recording studio for months at a time, the house has a gym that doubles as a dance studio for rehearsing, a hair salon, a study office. The master bedroom, with its panoramic windows, is practically afloat in ocean view.

A white-oak bench and chaise lounge, a triangular stone low table and pale fabrics continue the light palette in the second-floor master bedroom. The glass wall gives a panoramic view of the Pacific. Jackson, who is a choreographer as well, also built a gym/dance studio.

"When I was thirteen," Jackson explains, " my parents redid our house. I remember going after school with my mother and sister to look at fabrics and thinking, This is so girly, I can't take it. I was such a tomboy. So when I finally got my own place, my mother, who went to school for interior design, thought, Oh my God, this house is going to look a mess. But when she came over, she said Oh my goodness!'" The house, as it happened, had turned out quite well. Jackson and Elizondo, who recently acquired an apartment together in New York City, decided they needed a place where they could relax and write music together. She wanted a house that felt almost as if "it had just washed ashore." She selected stone, rough fabrics and sand textures, and she made sure the rooms were filled with light.

The brick wall in the entrance hall, complete with dusty ferns in a planter, was knocked down. The tiny window were popped out, and the walls were opened up to their load-bearing limits to admit as much view and light as possible. The beveled-glass-and Lucite staircase was replaced with a simple plaster sweep. A noise blocking atrium between the street and the front door was planted with all manner of cactuses and succulents.

The decor embodies the unforced informality of its owners, an attitude that seems to also extend to their possessions. A nephew of Jackson's once knocked several teeth out of a framed sixty five million year old shark (above). "He actually got a cut on his leg from the fossil teeth," recalls the singer. "I have a gouge limestone bowl, and it holds some other shark's teeth, so I just threw the fossil teeth in there too."