Hunting for a Waterfront Home That’s Ready for Its Closeup

You probably don’t know John and Denise Gooden, but there’s a very good chance that you’ve seen the inside of their house — and their ocean views — on many occasions.

Their seaside home in Malibu, Calif., which features a floor-to-ceiling coastal vista, has been featured on several TV shows in recent years, including “Revenge,” “Brothers & Sisters” and “90210.” It’s also served as a scenic backdrop for countless commercials, videos and photoshoots, including a recent cover shoot for “InStyle” featuring Zendaya.

“It’s become a business for me,” said Mrs. Gooden, who lives full time with her husband in the home. She typically stays in the property’s guesthouse while filming is taking place. She’s keenly aware that the crew is there to do a job and her role is not to interfere. “For the most part I stay very hidden,” she said.

Beyond the obvious grandeur of their home — designed by architect Scott Johnson and completed in 2002 — there’s a reason location scouts keep knocking on their door.

The Goodens have become well acquainted with the intricacies and exigencies of renting out their home as a location — which makes things much easier for people like Gregory Alpert, the locations manager whose team gave the Gooden residence its most prominent recent exposure, as the home of Renata Klein (Laura Dern) on “Big Little Lies” on HBO.

Mr. Alpert is a locations veteran, having worked on projects from “Minority Report” to “Frost/Nixon” to “Sharp Objects.” For “Big Little Lies,” which tells the story of five women in ritzy Monterey, Calif., who are drawn together by an untimely death, Mr. Alpert and his team were charged by the director Jean-Marc Vallée with finding distinct oceanfront properties that would reflect each character’s personalities.

Mr. Vallée “gave us a very clear blueprint,” Mr. Alpert said of one of his early meetings with the show’s director. The instruction for selecting potential houses for each character started with thinking about where each woman fell in the financial hierarchy of the show.

“At the top of the pinnacle, you have Renata,” Mr. Alpert said, recalling a scene from the show’s first season in which she’s outside on her patio overlooking the ocean, drinking a glass of wine and “looking down at the world.” Mr. Alpert knew Renata’s house had to illustrate that she was on top of it.

Which led him to the Goodens’ picturesque — if oft-filmed — residence.

Initially, Mr. Alpert feared he might encounter a common dilemma with that property that location managers face: a home that’s knocked out of contention for being too familiar because it’s already been used “a million times.”

“But the way Jean-Marc crafted it, it looked different than I had ever seen it before,” Mr. Alpert said, referring to Mr. Vallée’s kinetic filmmaking style, which relies on hand-held cameras as opposed to tripods or Steadicams.

Several of the other characters in “Big Little Lies” needed coastal homes, but each location had a requirement of its own. For Celeste (Nicole Kidman), Mr. Alpert found a home with a spacious balcony that overlooks a rocky shoreline, showcasing “crashing waves that work as sort of a metaphor for what’s going on in her own life.” (Celeste, we come to learn, is working overtime to keep her violent marriage under wraps.) This, it turns out, is the one home that was actually located in Monterey.

For Madeline (Reese Witherspoon), the aim was to find a cozy house right on the water. However, “I can count on one hand how many houses in Central California are actually on the beach,” Mr. Alpert said. Unlike Southern California, “the Central Coast is all about that rocky shoreline, so in Monterey proper, there was one house” that was available on the water, “and it wasn’t the right look.”

Mr. Alpert found a home on the sand further south in Malibu that, while grand, exuded comfort more than luxury. The home embodies that permanent vacation vibe of coastal California, he said, where “everyone hangs out in that kitchen.”

As for the Goodens, Mrs. Gooden said it’s a joy to continually share her home with the world. “It’s a one-of-a-kind house. It was our dream house,” she said of the home where they raised their three sons. “It’s very exciting and complimentary for us that people enjoy the house because it was such a labor of love for us to build. Besides being a home, it really is a work of art.”

It also helps that, besides owning such a beautiful home, the Goodens are well-versed in what is — and isn’t — acceptable in negotiations. As Mr. Alpert recalled, sometimes homeowners can make a location manager’s job extra difficult with extreme demands.

In one story line in “Big Little Lies,” Celeste plans to leave her abusive husband, so Mr. Alpert’s team went searching for an apartment that she could move into. They found a place they thought would be perfect, at least until “the homeowner started requesting all sorts of bizarre things from us,” he said.

“Some I won’t share,” he added. “But one ask included adding wording into the contract itself that he could take a picture with Nicole Kidman. I stated that I could not agree to that on paper, but offered up that I would ask Nicole. Knowing Nicole she most likely would have done it.” But the homeowner demanded a promise on paper.

“At that point I said ‘Thank you, I’ll get back to you,’ and I walked outside, called my team, and we immediately started scouting for a new apartment,” Mr. Alpert said.

That experience affirmed something that Mr. Alpert firmly believes: When searching for a perfect location, on the waterfront or not, it’s often the owners — not the places — that are the most crucial factor. Unlike the cast and crew, who might shoot at a location for a few days, a location manager can be on site for weeks.

He said that forging friendships is key to a successful shoot. One of the most critical things to manage, Mr. Alpert said, is not what you’re seeing onscreen, but everything that you’re not.

“Even if we’re shooting in someone’s house and we’re only shooting in the living room, we’re in every other room, and we’re three blocks down the road,” he said. “That’s where you have to really go out of your way to ingratiate yourself and become friendly with the area where you shoot so you don’t get into a situation where they want to kick you out.”

Despite his title, his real job, Mr. Alpert joked, is not location management. “I call it location mothering,” he said.