This afternoon I deconstruct an article about Montecito that was published in yesterday’s New York Times.
Are there Americans who don’t have fantasies about a better life in California? About gold in the rivers, giant fruit in the yards and a hardcore, neon sunset every single night? The collective westward yearn is endlessly evolving and migrating around the very big state, sometimes dampened but never entirely silenced by stories about natural disasters and inner-city crime.
My comment: Yes indeed. The trend these days is to say farewell to California and move eastward—say, to Texas, Idaho or Florida—due to government mismanagement, rampant homelessness and a woke disposition that knows no boundaries. Truth is, this state has become flakier than a bad case of dandruff in a snowstorm.
If property values, pop-culture mentions, and multipage Architectural Digest spreads are any indication, that yearn currently centers on the not-even-10 square miles of a not-even-town on the southern edge of Santa Barbara: Montecito.
My comment: This is due to much funny money emanating from Covid-19 that allowed very rich folk to exploit the PPP program to their own financial advantage and become much richer at taxpayer expense while those truly in need went belly up.
Too much cash was printed out of thin air and it caused property prices in these parts to spike far beyond reason. Add the cesspools that parts of cities like LA and San Fran have become due to mismanagement and homelessness and little wonder folks who can now work at home (another Covid byproduct) are attracted not just to Montecito but also Santa Barbara and the Santa Ynez Valley, where prices have also spiraled out of control.
A place whose desirability makes it clear that the current American dream is not about hustling to auditions or starting a company that changes the world — as the Californian fantasies of old promised — but instead is simply about being very, very comfortable as often as possible. If “wellness” were made manifest by a single dot on an enormous world map, that dot would land neatly on Montecito. It’s where wealthy people who have succeeded in becoming their best selves go in order to maintain the exalted state.
My comment: Judging by the influx of glitz and bling, being here (for them) is not about “wellness” but about materialistic grandstanding.
It’s an essential stopping place in the trajectory of modern fame, the place to go when attention grows onerous: Oprah Winfrey has a colossal spread here, and Ellen DeGeneres has a few. Montecito is where Gwyneth Paltrow goes when the pressures of Brentwood are too much. Adam Levine and some number of Ritchie sisters and their stylist are all residents, and Ariana Grande was, for a time, in a house she bought from Ms. DeGeneres. Jennifer Aniston bought a $16.5 million property from Ms. Winfrey, who had not had time to use it. Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom have a place there, as does Ms. Perry’s father, who is endlessly bopping around town dressed in a psychedelic mash up of Chrome Hearts and Ed Hardy, an aesthetic that borrows equally from ’90s O.C. skaters, Elton John and Flava Flav. Last year, the celebrity juicer Amanda Chantal Bacon moved to town, her suitcase packed with cordyceps, head scarves and health.
My comment: A lotta name-dropping here. I saw Steve Martin with his family at Ca’Dario last week. Trust me, he’s not going to be funny for you. Or even sociable. Better to be sitting at a bar with someone unknown who’s happy to say “hey” and have a conversation.
A driving tour of Montecito’s elaborate and forbidding gates and lined driveways suggests that only Madame Tussauds has more celebrities per square foot, even if Montecito’s celebrities — in their off-the-clock mufti of leggings and micro-weight Patagonia vests and dark baseball caps — can be harder to spot. Really, in the end, where else could Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, have gone to live their truth?
My comment: Chuckle, oink, barf.
But it’s not just the famous who come to Montecito, it’s also the straight-up rich. The writers of “Succession” situated the classy, stealth-wealth billionaire Pierce family in a home that, in real life, is owned by Google’s former chief executive Eric Schmidt. Montecito is loaded with the less-recognizable names behind very recognizable things, including Ty Warner, the press-shy inventor of Beanie Babies, who lives in a rose-colored mansion with views of the whole landscape.
My comment: Ty has dissed the entire community by keeping his landmark beachfront resort hotel shuttered up since March 2020.
It’s a dizzying combination of old wealth, new wealth and outrageous physical beauty that has begun to attract an ever-wider range of dreamers. And that new level of visibility has the potential to rattle the whole thing.
My comment: Dreamers can no longer afford Montecito. The obnoxious crowd moving here are the same folks who took over my old neighborhood in Beverly Hills in the 1970s. You know them when you see them (too often) around town: Arrogant and rude. They roll through stop signs, honk their horns and park without any regard for other motorists. Add: Cuss loudly in restaurants as if someone should care what’s on their meager minds.
Until a few months ago, I had never been to Montecito. In my mind, it was a place where evenings called for a lightweight cashmere sweater (they do!) and green juice ran through city taps (nope); a place so serene that there was no such thing as a bad night’s sleep there.
My comment: Except when Amtrak and freight trains roll through nightly in the wee hours, horns a-blare.
Montecito did, for a long time, stay — if not secret — relatively unmentioned, apart from the occasional little item about Ms. Winfrey’s vegetable garden, or the fact that Rob Lowe is a Republican and lives there. The celebrities have always come: The small hotel in town was opened by Charlie Chaplin. Clark Gable and Greta Garbo both owned homes in town.
My comment: Chaplin’s ghost still pulls pranks around the Montecito Inn.
Sometimes it is so quiet and so pretty in Montecito that I find myself wondering if this is what it’s like to be dead.
My comment: That’s what Charlie Chaplin continues to wonder.
But if you truly want to wonder about it, wander into the bar at Lucky’s and enjoy its funereal ambience—black walls, where’s the casket?
And yet Montecito is hardly immune to the catastrophes facing the rest of the world and, specifically, the natural disasters plaguing California.
In 2018, the town was devastated by a massive landslide that swept down the mountain and through its streets, killing 23 people as they slept in their beds.
It was hard to comprehend if you weren’t actually there when it happened.
My comment: I was here, at double ground-zero, struck from two directions.
Realtors will not tell prospective buyers that mudslides are a regular, cyclical occurrence, four times each century. Yet the land on which houses were completely destroyed have now been rebuilt for the next mudslide.
The second half of 2020 saw a 411 percent jump in real estate closings in Montecito. Prices skyrocketed in response, holding at about 25 percent higher than they were in prepandemic times. If you could afford it, where better to be stuck at home? Montecito is about 90 minutes from Los Angeles by car…
My comment: Much too close.
…and there are multiple commercial flights (not to mention a private airstrip) making the hourlong hop from Santa Barbara to San Francisco.
My comment: Who wants to hop to San Fran anymore?
Santa Barbara has found itself in an affordable housing crisis. And as the area has become better known, the short-term-rental market has exploded, which has had the effect of making the primary-residence market more expensive than ever. It can feel like Montecito’s most pressing problems are the problems of too much: too much desirability, too many people wanting a piece of the spectacular pie.
My comment: Not to mention too much traffic. To make way for the hordes, new traffic patterns are underway, leading to gridlocked traffic inching from one end of Coast Village Road to the other, an annoyance and an environmental hazard due to ever-idling vehicles. As for parking? Don’t even ask.
There’s no question that Montecito, like so many places, has changed from the rural, idyllic days…
My comment: No question whatsoever.
The Coral Casino casino, owned by Mr. Warner, the Beanie Baby tycoon, closed at the beginning of the pandemic and has yet to reopen amid a bitter fight about the inclusion of Tydes, a restaurant helmed by the celebrity chef Thomas Keller that would open to the public. (The pool and other facilities would remain private.)
My comment: The reason Ty has not reopened the Coral Casino is because of his legal battle with Four Seasons, the hotel management group, which he wants gone.
Sadly, when Ty opens his “public” restaurant inside the club, prices will doubtless compare to Lucky’s $88 steak (albeit with much better quality).
This all has the Montecito old guard up in arms: Is it really a club if anyone can stop by for a chopped salad and an iced tea? “A restaurant of this setting, standard and cuisine deserves buzz, energy and a vibrant ambience,” Mr. Warner offered by way of a rebuttal.
My comment: Ty is well within his rights to open his club’s restaurant to the public. Club members (most of them, anyway) are a bunch of snooty snobs who think they own the place. Which may be why Ty has kept his place closed for going on three-and-a-half years, teach them a lesson about who’s in charge.
“You’ll hear people complaining that you can’t just walk into Lucky’s and get a table anymore,” says a local, referring to the local steakhouse where the filet mignon is $88.
My comment: As locals know, you can order the same filet mignon at Jill’s Place a mile away for 38 bucks. And instead of your steak arriving on a plate all by itself (side dishes at Lucky’s are 20 bucks apiece), at Jill’s it comes with pea soup, a salad, sautéed vegetables and scalloped potatoes. And the staff at Jill’s don’t act like they’re doing you a huge favor by providing a table.
In October 2021, a local woman sent a screen shot of a mountain lion she had snapped from her home security camera to a neighborhood chat group: an exciting thing to share with some friends. Her phone began ringing right away: It was The Sun, it was The Daily Mail, all wanting to know, were Harry and Meghan in danger? The woman, who lived on the other side of the town, was confused. It has nothing to do with them, she thought.
My comment: Indeed. From my experience, no one talks about Harry & Megs.
Living with the threat of further natural disasters is a choice that residents of coastal California have been making for years, and scores of people have decided that it’s absolutely worth the risk. (State Farm, Allstate, AIG and Chubb insurers, among others, disagree; all have stopped issuing new home insurance policies in the state.)
My comment: Insurance actuaries know their craft.
In January, on the fifth anniversary of the deadly mudflow, Montecito flooded again. Ms. DeGeneres, who was sheltering in place (her house is on high ground), posted a video of a creek on her property gushing water. “We need to be nicer to Mother Nature,” she said, “because Mother Nature is not happy with us.”
My comment: Ellen was posing by a public creek. Mother Nature will outlive the human species without caring one way or the other about humanity’s continued existence. Not even Ellen’s.
Montecito, and the embarrassing torrent of clichés it evokes, makes it easy to forget the threats. As I wandered around the near-psychedelic wonder that is Lotusland, I couldn’t believe that just a few hours later I’d be back on a United Airlines flight to Newark, quietly navigating for the shared armrest in coach with more hostility than I’d felt all week.
When I’d first arrived, I sent a text to my husband back in Brooklyn suggesting that we, too, renounce our families and move West for truth and eucalyptus and blah blah blah. I sent more: photographs of a 70-year-old bonsai tree tucked beside a redwood, a trippy cactus forest silhouetted against the Santa Ynez, the Pacific stretching out before me.
“I think it’s time to come home,” he wrote back. “You do know about the Lotus eaters, right?”
My comment: “Blah, blah, blah” indeed. Weak ending.
Memo to New York Times: Next time send someone who knows how to delve beneath the surface.