Malibuites wanting to store furniture or other items while out-of-town, moving or remodeling their homes, usually have the burden of driving at least nine miles, to Santa Monica, or further, to the Valley.
Well, soon, residents will have to look no further than west Malibu. A state-of-the-art storage facility will open for business in town this spring.
After dealing with bureaucratic processes, longtime Malibu resident Isaac Shachory, along with sons Rafael and Max, is opening Malibu Sky Self Storage at 28909 PCH, just east of Kanan Road, in April.
“It took us four years from the day we started to get this far,” said Rafael Shachory. “The county and the Coastal Commission were both very costly and demanding. The city squeezed us the hardest, making it almost unprofitable to build.”
But the Shachory family persisted because they felt the demand was there. “Malibu is a dense residential community with no real storage for miles,” said Rafael. “The response since we started building is great. The calls come in almost daily, all looking to reserve space.” With construction not yet completed, about a quarter of the facility is already leased, he said.
Part of the battle with obtaining permits, according to Rafael, was that the agencies were worried small businessmen, operating out of their homes, would use the storage space for parking inventory, and then go to the facility several times a day to get new items, to stock goods or to mail to mail-order customers. “We won’t allow people to operate a business out of their storage space,” said Rafael.
The family, which also operates storage facilties in Burbank and Hollywood, said the Malibu facility, consisting of four separate buildings, will have larger storage spaces than the other facilities, some up to 1,000 square feet, and some with 18-foot tall ceilings. Several spaces will be equipped with individual alarms. Each building will be temperature controlled–different items needing different temperatures. For instance, wine collectors may want to store their wine in a 55-degree building.
In addition, there will be safety vaults for valuables, such as fine art or antiques.
Isaac Shachory plans to have 100 storage spaces available, but that number may vary, until each renter makes their needs known. Landscaping calls for a wide variety of indigenous plants covering 13,000 square feet. The buildings will be finished in stucco, in Spanish style with tile roofs.
“We have almost an acre of land and yet the amount devoted to storage space is small–roughly 25 percent,” said Rafael. “With the prohibitions on how little of our land we could use, this project might not have been feasable until we did a study and realized that Malibuites are willing to pay a higher price than normal to have their goods stored close to home.”
Rafael said they expect clientele to consist of artists storing work, divorced couples storing furniture until they can find new accomodations and homeowners storing furniture while their homes are being built or remodeled.