The Sussexes chose Montecito for a reason – now this star-studded destination is a magnet for travellers
Whatever the time of the year, Montecito’s main drag of Coast Village Road on a Friday morning is a sight for city-weary eyes. Ripe avocados and organic oranges are piled high at the farmers’ market where the exceedingly wealthy exchange hellos like the opening scene of a Nancy Meyers film. After a day at the beach, head to Lucky’s Steakhouse and there’s a good chance you’ll spot a Hollywood actor, vodka martini in hand, cheers-ing pals al fresco. Montecito might have been put on our map by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who descended on the Californian town in 2020, but they’re not the first big names to make it their personal paradise.
The photographer Firooz Zahedi came here when he was invited by his college friend Diandra Douglas (Michael’s ex-wife) to visit the then-couple’s seven-acre, seven-bedroom home, La Quinta, in the late 1980s. The sprawling Mediterranean-style mansion, built in the 1920s, had terracotta tiles and exposed beams aplenty, plus pool, palm trees, pond, views of the Pacific and more powder rooms than you could count on one hand.
Having grown up in Knightsbridge and holidayed on the Côte d’Azur, the photographer marvelled at the similarities of what local property agents today call the American Riviera with its French cousin. Montecito boasts a hulking mountain range tumbling into golden sands with mansions scattered among foothills where cypresses and cacti jostle with fruit trees. It’s less than two hours up the coast from Los Angeles and around five hours south of San Francisco.
In 2015, Zahedi and his wife, Beth Rudin DeWoody, a contemporary art collector, bought their first property in the area. They upgraded in 2020 to a light-flooded mid-century home – featured in Zahedi’s new book, Montecito Style – designed by Jack Lionel Warner, the same architect who had created the nearby Birnam Wood Golf Club. Their new home was a blank canvas for their sculptures and paintings by the likes of Lucio Fontana, Rashid Johnson and Ed Ruscha.
‘It’s our own Hamptons, without the mayhem of the Hamptons – which is all Page Six (the New York Post’s gossip column),’ says Zahedi. ‘Whenever I am here I forget the world, I forget all the political upheaval we are going through. It reminds me of England in the old days when you could walk down the King’s Road or in Knightsbridge and people didn’t bother you. There’s great respect for privacy,’ he says.
The town of Montecito (Spanish for ‘little mountain’) in Santa Barbara took off in the gold rush of the mid-19th century. Franciscan monks had arrived from Spain in the late 1700s looking to convert the indigenous Chumash tribe to Catholicism and the original Santa Barbara Mission still stands – the architectural paradigm for many subsequent builds. In the 1920s famed architects such as Reginald Johnson and George Washington Smith were commissioned to dream up grand estates in the Spanish colonial style as seasonal escapes for deep-pocketed clients, many from the East Coast.
With approximately 10,000 inhabitants, Montecito is now one of the most affluent corners of the United States. The crowd is a curious mix: celebrities, certainly, but also retired industrialists and their trustafarian offspring, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, and titans of TV, film and, most recently, tech.
‘Meg Ryan is a friend of mine,’ says Zahedi of the When Harry Met Sally star, who moved to Montecito just before the pandemic began. Ryan joined the likes of Kevin Costner, Rob Lowe, Natalie Portman, Robert Zemeckis and Jeff Bridges, who have all decamped here. ‘Previously she had lived in Bel Air and she said, "This is like living in Bel Air. You’re very secluded, you’re very safe." I think that’s why Harry and Meghan moved here.’ (Ryan, by the by, bought her home for $5.025 million in February 2020 and sold it for $13.25 million 18 months later, before purchasing another for $9.5 million last summer – an illustration of Montecito’s bonkers property boom, more of which later.)
In June 2020 the Sussexes purchased a nine-bedroom, 16-bathroom home with its own five-acre estate for $14.65 million.
‘A friend of mine has a beach house. She said that during Covid, Harry and Meghan would come over and use the gym,’ says Zahedi. ‘So they are not hiding behind a fence or in their house, they’re not being snobs. They’re making friends, hanging out – they are obviously happy.’
The sprawling property is a bucolic home for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s son Archie, three, and daughter Lilibet, 17 months, and a base from which to expand their empire (starting with that rumoured $100 million Netflix deal and an estimated $18 million Spotify one). It has become a familiar backdrop for the various media appearances the couple have made, chickens and all. It’s also a quiet sanctuary where Harry could write his much-delayed, much-discussed memoir.
The architecture prized by Zahedi in his book not only includes the predominant Mediterranean style favoured by the Sussexes, but also craftsmen’s cottages, Italianate palazzi and, like his own, mid-century modern homes. Prospective residents can take their pick from a breathtaking range of styles.
Naturally, nestling among these vast homes are the businesses that supply their wants. The shops that line Lillie Road in Summerland (the next town along, where former tennis No 1 Maria Sharapova lives), include gallery-like Garde with its sleek imported furniture from Pierre Augustin Rose, Carl Hansen and Faye Toogood, and The Well – a kind of Petersham Nurseries minus the restaurant – which provides plenty of inspiration.
In-demand interior designers ready to inject some Montecito style include Brigette Romanek, who worked on Gwyneth Paltrow’s home, which features an indoor hammock and pink onyx lounge bar (she bought it in 2016 and, upon finishing the renovation last year, Paltrow called it her ‘forever house’). Then there’s Rose Tarlow, who is Oprah Winfrey’s go-to; and Mark D Sikes, Reese Witherspoon’s favourite. He has remodelled six homes in the area (three for the same client) in the past eight years, with two more to come.
‘Montecito style is all about a casual elegance; a comfortable and inviting home, yet also designed for entertaining,’ Sikes tells me from Bermuda as he completes the installation of his latest project. ‘It’s indoor-outdoor living at its finest. The rest of California feels less easy and not as effortless. Everyone wants the Montecito style, and lifestyle.’ Sikes says that separate guest houses, pool houses and even a soccer pitch are requests he has recently received.
‘If you ask the average person in Montecito what they spend their money on, they will tell you they’re much more concerned about importing the right Tuscan tile for their bathroom, rather than spending on their wardrobe,’ explains Barnes-born Alice Ryan, who moved to Montecito in 2015 from New York, where she had worked for Ralph Lauren.
As an events organiser, Ryan has thrown galas for Lotusland, Montecito’s historic estate and botanical garden, which was created by a Polish opera diva, Ganna Walska, in the 1940s. In the five years Ryan spent living in the town (she returned to Barnes, London, with her husband and three children in 2020 after 22 years in the US), she planned many a party and luncheon.
‘If you can afford it, there is no place as luxurious,’ Ryan says. ‘If you are looking for a greater life balance and to fully embrace all of the beauty that is there in Santa Barbara, it’s unparalleled. But those people still need to have cocktails and dinners and to shop and be seen, and feel as if it’s an extension of their own aesthetic. Montecito ticks that box too.’
To Ryan’s mind, Montecito style is an attitude, a taste level and a set of behaviours that extends to how you entertain at home. Almost all dinners happen outdoors, long before the pandemic made that preferable. By and large, her clients go for a colour palette in harmony with the nature that surrounds them. ‘Elements that feel more natural, less contrived,’ as she puts it.
‘I always do my own flowers. I’ll use seagrasses, farm-grown roses and succulents, and I would supplement that with wildflowers – everything is a little more effortless and not quite so "done".’ And if clients don’t want any cut flowers at all, she’ll install living trees and plants in pots.
‘It was so easy because all those growers are out in Santa Barbara County,’ Ryan says. ‘You do have this very bountiful land. The climate lends itself so beautifully to everything growing.’
Despite her move back to the UK, Ryan still throws events in Montecito because, she says, ‘it’s where every brand wants to geotarget’. But on her last visit she noticed that the inhabitants’ average age has nosedived, with younger families moving in. Younger, but also more affluent, explains Ryan.
‘At Butterfly Beach (the town’s most picturesque beach, with photogenic cliffs at one end), the cars used to be all Priuses and whatnot. Now it’s Maybachs and Tesla SUVs. The LA money that is much more blingy has come to town.’ And with that comes a little more big-city urgency: ‘You can feel the wealth,’ she says. ‘People were using their horn to make the turn off Coast Village Road into the Country Mart. That’s not cool. No one is in a hurry in Montecito, that’s why they live here.’
It strikes her that ‘Montecito has become a lifestyle decision. I see people using it as a vehicle to promote and position themselves.’ And the effect isn’t just local. In Paris there’s now a Montecito restaurant on the Boulevard des Capucines, promising ‘lush greenery and casual-chic colourful plates, all executed with a Californian flair, to exacting French techniques.’ (This is according to the restaurant’s own website.)
Out-of-towners can now signal their membership of the Montecito set thanks to the arrival of the Rosewood Miramar Beach. For $2,000 a night, guests enjoy the hotel’s two pools, a beachfront restaurant and members’ club. The hotel is a first in the portfolio of Rick Caruso, a high-end mall magnate still vying to be mayor of LA at the time of going to press. On its Forte dei Marmi-style beach you can find celebrity offspring throwing American footballs while their parents catch up on loungers. Where else to start your house-hunting in arguably the most coveted neighbourhood in the US?
The pandemic brought an influx of new faces (and new money) following the Sussexes’ arrival. The property market turned red hot. Covid restrictions imposed by Santa Barbara County never reached LA levels, so restaurants remained open (albeit only with outdoor dining) and beaches and hiking trails never closed. Word soon spread to Silicon Valley and beyond that this was a place where your civil liberties could remain uncurtailed, as long as you wore a mask indoors in public. The first arrivals were renters, preferring to Zoom with a sea view while staying on the same time zone as LA and San Francisco. As waves of infections and new variants continued, prices for short-term rentals shot up and new visitors from further afield realised that buying would make far more sense.
Soon house prices had risen by up to 40 per cent. People started paying by the millions, in cash, and without an inspection, to seal the deal. Historically, the issues buyers used to haggle over with vendors, such as levels of fire and mudslide risk (this part of California is prone to both – a mudslide in January 2018 took 23 lives), went out the bay window. Suddenly vendors were asking in excess of $150 million for oceanfront properties, and prices remain prohibitively high.
Inevitably, property – who bought what and what they paid – has been a hot topic in restaurants such as Lucky’s Steakhouse, Tre Lune and the Plough & Angel at San Ysidro Ranch. There have been sightings of Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom, who paid $14.2 million for their home in the Santa Ynez foothills, dangerously close to bear and mountain lion territory. Meanwhile, Ariana Grande coughed up a mere $6.75 million for hers. This year’s recent arrivals include Jennifer Aniston (who, in September, paid Oprah Winfrey $14.8 million for a four-bedroom Mediterranean-style mansion on a one-acre corner of Winfrey’s estate) and Cameron Diaz, who shelled out $12 million for a hilltop mansion in May.
In truth, there are too many tech founders, financiers and grands fromages who’ve made the move to Montecito to mention, but they include Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, who paid $30.8 million for his pad. Tesla’s head of design Franz von Holzhausen chose a $12-million home. Nick Swinmurn, founder of online shoe retailer Zappos, paid $8.6 million for a toehold in the property market. Dragoneer Investment Group’s Marc Stad bought twice in three weeks, paying $29 million and $12.2 million for two separate properties.
‘I have a broker who constantly calls me up to say: "I have people from the Hamptons and people from New York who want to buy your house,"’ says Zahedi. ‘I say: "I don’t want to sell."’
No one has monetised the lifestyle quite like serial house flippers Ellen DeGeneres and her wife Portia de Rossi. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos bought a house from them for $34 million in 2018 and they have just sold another house for $36 million to Justin Bieber’s manager Scooter Braun, having paid $20.95 million for it at the beginning of the year.
As for the future, how high can Montecito go? Zahedi, for one, is worried: ‘I just hope one day Montecito doesn’t become the Hamptons of the West Coast. You have a lot of new money in the Hamptons, building McMansions and trying to show off. Everyone’s trying to outdo each other… You can’t really see a lot of the mansions in Montecito because they’re hidden behind trees and acres and acres of land,’ he adds.
Ryan is less concerned about the town losing its discreet elegance. For her, it will always keep its exclusivity: ‘There is an entire contingent of people that you won’t see in Lucky’s, you won’t see in Tre Lune, who very much live behind the hedges.’ But it is Sikes who conjures up the most evocative image of Montecito, to convey its charm to those who have never been. ‘Those hedge-lined meandering streets,’ he enthuses, ‘you feel like you are in a dream, trying to find your way out of a maze – but you don’t want to get out.’
Montecito Style: Paradise on California’s Gold Coast (Monacelli, £39.95), by Firooz Zahedi and Lorie Dewhirst Porter, is out now
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