There are moments, when you take the 90-minute drive up the coast from Los Angeles to Montecito, where Prince Harry and Meghan have set up their new home, when you can almost imagine yourself going to an uninhabited desert.
The mini-malls, car dealerships and fast-food joints give way to hunted mountain boats and plunging canyons. Then, after another stretch of asphalt and commercial activity, where the mountains meet the Pacific Ocean, comes a delirious undeveloped strip of coastline, with uneven beaches to the left and the footpaths of Los Padres National Forest to the right.
Then comes Montecito. It is probably a retreat, not a city in some recognizable sense, but a cluster of narrow routes that run from the coast through lush stands of eucalyptus and pine to a popular hot spring in the hills. It has a gas station, but no chain stores – just a few small commercial strips, known as the Upper and Lower Village.
What it has is an extraordinary concentration of wealth and fame. This is the home of Oprah Winfrey (she calls her sprawling estate “the Promised Land”), Ellen DeGeneres, Ariana Grande, Gwyneth Paltrow and a wide sprinkling of the US super-empire, whose multimillion-dollar estates are the hills sidewalks, and sometimes, raise local eyebrows because of their bare, unabashed extravagance.
In 1966, crime writer Ross Macdonald found that in the mock-rustic shops of Montecito ‘residents’ play to be simple villagers the way Versailles ‘court staff acted as farmers’.
In short, it’s a place where a few bad blue flowers can feel right at home – while at the same time being assured of peace, it appears that they are coveted.
It came as no surprise to Montecitans, as to residents of the big sister city next to their village, Santa Barbara, to learn this week that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have remained in their midst for more than a month. In those hills, you could be helped into a $ 15 million mansion – as they are thought of – for years on end and no one but your servants ever knew.
The distribution that local real estate says the couple has purchased includes nine bedrooms, 12 bathrooms, a guest house, a tea house, a tennis court, a swimming pool and a custom jungle gym for the kids. Known as “Chateau at Riven Rock”, it is only accessible along a gated private driveway, whose sign warns passers-by to stay well away unless they have permission to continue.
This strip of Southern California coast attracts no shortage of superlatives. In 1928, Charlie Chaplin called Montecito the ‘cream of the coast’ and gathered a group of investors to establish the Montecito Inn, the anchor where the rest of the community arose. TC Boyle, who probably qualifies as at the scoring end of Montecito’s 9,000 residents, despite being a renowned, bestselling author, recently wrote how he appreciated the closeness of nature and the ‘semirural atmosphere’.
“We have no sidewalks here,” he said. ‘If we want sidewalks, we can drive the five minutes to Santa Barbara … But we do not want sidewalks. We want nature, we want dirt, trees, flowers. ”
There is, of course, a dark side – the noir behind the sunshine. All those rich homeowners are jealous of what they have and are not afraid to use their money and their power to kill anyone – locally elected officials or local newspaper columnists, for the most part – who dares to advise them to make room for more affordable housing, or are consuming more than their fair share of California’s desperately short supply of water.
Fifteen years ago, actor Rob Lowe raised eyebrows when he not only strongly armed the community to agree to a major expansion of his hill palace, but threatened his neighbors with restraining orders when they truncated ficus trees on his property line, because they interfere with the view of the ocean. Lowe also went to war against the local newspaper when, while covering the controversy, he made the relatively uncontroversial decision to publish his address. The publisher took over Lowe’s site, and the editorial staff merged shortly thereafter.
At the time, Lowe was part of something called the Homeowners Defense Fund, whose mission – essentially to keep poorer people – was encouraged by a $ 1,000-per-person cocktail party hosted by Carol Burnett, Bo Derek and Tab Hunter. among others. (Lowe eventually left the group and sold his property in 2017.)
With such an elaboration, the community has easily resisted calls to merge with Santa Barbara and remain roughly independent. To silence critics of water consumption, Montecito last month cut a deal to pay for half of a $ 72 million desalination plant in Santa Barbara; in return, Santa Barbara has agreed to sell Montecito all the water it wants for the next 50 years.
However, all the money in the world cannot change the fact that foothill communities in California are at the mercy of sometimes horrific natural forces. In the winter of 2017-18, wildfires shook and denied wildfires the Santa Ynez Mountains above the city and primed the slopes for devastating mudslides once the rains came. Mud and mud came in the dead of night at the canyons from racing, houses destroyed, a gas fire started, and more than 20 people killed.
As Macdonald noted in his Montecito-inspired novel, Black Money: “Almost anything can happen here. Has almost everything. ”
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