Morgan Neville

JOURNAL

ontecito WINTER 2023

VANDENBERG: WHERE ROCKETS MEET RIVIERA

JAMES CAMERON

ON TERMINATING HIS TIME IN SB AFTER 25 YEARS: THE EXIT INTERVIEW

Morgan Neville: ULTIMATE MONTECITAN?

2022

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2022

2022

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JOURNAL

ontecito Volume 16 Issue 4 WINTER | 2023

CEO Gwyn Lurie gwyn@montecitojournal.net

President & COO Tim Buckley tim@montecitojournal.net

Editor Les Firestein les@montecitojournal.net Art Director Trent Watanabe trent@montecitojournal.net Copy Editor Lily Harbin Editor-at-Large Jeff Wing Design/Layout Assistant Stevie Acuña Director of Operations Jessikah Fechner jmoran@montecitojournal.net VP Sales & Marketing Leanne R. Wood leanne@montecitojournal.net (805) 284-7177 Account Managers Tanis Nelson: tanis@montecitojournal.net Susan Brooks: sue@montecitojournal.net Elizabeth Nadel: elizabeth@montecitojournal.net Bryce Eller: bryce@montecitojournal.net Photography Blake Bronstad and Kim Reierson Contributors Hattie Beresford, Michelle Ebbin, Erin Graffy, Rob Hill, Kim Reierson, Gabe Saglie, Jeff Wing

Montecito JOURNAL

is published by Montecito Journal Media Group, LLC. Corporate offices are located at 1206 Coast Village Circle, Suite G, Santa Barbara, CA 93108 For distribution, advertising, or other inquiries: (805) 565-1860 www.montecitojournal.net

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Contents 54.Morgan Neville Curates Our Culture

– In 2014, Morgan Neville won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and a Grammy Award for Best Music Film. The locus of these two coveted statuettes?

A globally lauded documentary called 20 Feet from Stardom, whose formula was pure Neville: find the anomalous detail in the outskirts of the topic you thought you knew cold – and dig out the emotionally wrenching backstory. Johnny Cash, Anthony Bourdain, Muddy Waters, and Mickey Mouse are among the many subjects Neville has beatified through filmed exegesis. Les Firestein does his Rorschach interrogation to the usual memorable effect.

72.James Cameron: The Exit Interview

– Ever wonder where James Cameron developed such a fertile imagination? Come with us on a journey to the Santa Barbara ranch the director is now selling – where he raised his family, incubated an innovative school with wife Suzy Amis, developed a couple of submarines… oh, and wrote both the Avatar movies. Did we mention it’s off-grid and comes with a subsistence farm?

82.

Carat and Stick – Diamonds may be a girl’s

best friend, but they are born in crushing hellfire.

Produced in tectonic circumstances that make them scarce and difficult to acquire, precious things are precious for a reason. Rubies, sapphires, gold... these baubles are not just lying around in plain sight, and in their pursuit we gouge holes so enormous they are visible from space. Of course greed, malice, and lust for power are also drawn to precious stones and metals like steel filings to a magnet. But a little ingenuity can win the day.

GER p Sales com 9

Montecito JOURNAL

RELAX

JOURNAL

About Our Cover:

ontecito WINTER 2023

VANDENBERG: WHERE ROCKETS MEET RIVIERA

JAMES CAMERON

ON TERMINATING HIS TIME IN SB AFTER 25 YEARS: THE EXIT INTERVIEW

VOL. 16

4

WINTER • 2023

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Morgan Neville: ULTIMATE MONTECITAN?

Max-o-matic– Welcome to Morgan Neville’s neighborhood.

Our brilliant cover artist Max-o-matic (aka Maximo Tuja) gives Montecitan Morgan Neville the mucho maximalist montage.

We tell Max the ideas and he makes the magic. Maxomatically!!

WINTER

94.A Stitch in Time Tweaks the Paradigm

– “Embroidery.” Even the word is calming. But just as oils can be brought to bear on both Norman Rockwell’s warmly photorealistic scenes of main street and Jackson Pollock’s transgressive splatter statements, so can colored thread be made to do the bidding of whomever commands the hoop. Cassandra Dias explains and demonstrates embroidery’s new wave.

Really Going On at Vandenberg 106.What’s Space Force Base?

– What was once an Air Force Base is now a “Space Force Base.” Even the completely incurious will have their interest piqued at that crazy change of nomenclature. Rob Hill unpacks Vandenberg’s cloak of secrecy and array of rumors, from Nazi POWs to bat-winged, physics-defying aircraft. While the base’s perennial reputation for uncorroborated strangeness has long been catnip for adoring rumor-mongers, one Vandenberg program is verifiable, and verifiably cool. The Surface Water and Ocean Topography program promises orbital insights into the evolving state of our oceans and waterways.

118.Seeing Is Believing

– Occhiali eyewear boutique is one of those puzzling local establishments whose provenance is not self-evident. Where did this glittering Pandora’s Box of boutique spectacles come from? The place traces its roots to the home of cheesesteaks and the Liberty Bell, has ties to local experimental theater, and has enjoyed recent dalliances with Belgium, France, and the actor Steve McQueen (as you’ve surely guessed). Forgive this closing sentiment – but there is much more to Occhiali than meets the eye.

128.Seasonal Soirées

– Though the Santa Barbara Historical Museum has, through the decades, been many things to many people, it may be reliably said that nobody ever thought of the place as a strutting nexus of high fashion. But we all make mistakes. By 1880 Santa Barbara had exited its “gunslinging highway robber” phase to become a draw for the silk-and-satin set from the East Coast and elsewhere. Erin Graffy lifts the veil on a century of Santa Barbara haute couture and the “Seasonal Soirées” exhibit currently holding sway at the museum.

140.Retail Repertoire

– “Retail” is one of those words which, while technically correct, can sound a bit prosaic given the treasures on display. Kinda like calling King Solomon’s Mine a “cozy little cave.” At any rate, we invite you to sashay at your own pace through this tantalizing wonderland of finery whose variety, class, and uniqueness you’re not likely to have previously seen gathered in one place. We don’t want to sound boastful – but false modesty is for the birds.

2023

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Contents 176.The Possible Dream

– A guitarist named Steve has been quietly tearing it up with some of the most acclaimed musicians and composers in the music biz. From rudely staring toddler in Central Park, to class time with Dylan, jittery work on Broadway, and a seat with the Knights of the Round Singer-Songwriter Table, Steve Postell and his guitar have… well, you’ll see.

190.Way it Was

– A lost and legendary chessboard, a coterie of celebrated artists, and a son’s belated discovery of the long-sought treasure in his late father’s studio – this skullduggery could be the stuff of a parlor mystery. What if it all really happened? And what if each lavishly produced square of this unique chessboard had a story attached to it? Let’s set the “what ifs” aside. Hattie Beresford brings this unlikely true story to life as only she can.

208.Movement Is Life

– What sounds like a Confucian epigram is in fact the driving credo of Variant Training Lab. This place is a “gym” like the space shuttle is a commuter plane. Data – your data – provides the foundation for a regimen whose keynote is movement, the physiological fountain of youth. Variant Training Lab can help you with your buffitude, yes – but their mission statement is more elemental, and is all about keeping your moving parts… moving.

215.The Weekender

– Calling it the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library is very nearly a misnomer. Yes, the jewel in the crown is indeed a deep repository of documentary knowledge whose bottomless riches will be parsed and reinterpreted by scholars and historians forever. But there is also Air Force One, 18 sprawling galleries’ worth of immersive displays and historically potent curios, an exact replica of the Oval Office, jaw-dropping virtual experiences, a massive chunk of the once-fearsome Berlin Wall, and 300 rolling acres of the very nature Reagan himself so adored. Call it what you will; the place is magisterial.

220.

Real Estates – Say, are you looking for a

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“Be it ever so humble” is not a lyric to this particular tune.

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Contributors Erin Graffy – Erin Graffy is an award-winning author of more than 20 books and monographs on regional history and culture, biography, and poetry.

She was featured in the 2014 Tournament of Roses Parade as a California historian, and Graffy has served as a Santa Barbara society columnist for 25 years.

Kim Reierson – Kim Reierson is a California native who was raised in Bolivia. After graduating from UC Santa Barbara with a B.A. in fine arts, she worked as a photojournalist for various newspapers, winning several awards. In 2000, she moved to New York City, where she has been represented by the Robin Rice Gallery since 2001. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and her clients include Art and Auction, Forbes FYI, Bloomingdale’s, Ralph Lauren, the Smithsonian Institute, and Vogue Mexico, to name a few.

Rob Hill – Rob Hill is a 27-year veteran of the magazine industry.

In 2015, Hill was recruited to be the executive editor for the launch of another groundbreaking magazine, mg: For the Cannabis Professional. Hill cowrote the book Naked Ambition with Lonn Friend. Since then, Hill has also worked with author Harvey Kubernik on books about Neil Young, The Doors, and Jimi Hendrix.

Hattie Beresford – Hattie Beresford has been writing a local history column for Montecito Journal for nearly two decades.

She has written two Noticias and co-edited My Santa Barbara Scrap Book, the memoir of local artist Elizabeth Eaton Burton, for the Santa Barbara Historical Museum.

Her book, The Way It Was ~ Santa Barbara Comes of Age, is a collection of a few of her nearly 400 articles written for the Journal. She is the researcher and author of Celebrating CAMA’s Centennial, a chronicle of the Community Arts Music Association’s 100-year history.

Jeff Wing – The World is not such a big place. I mean, 25,000 miles around the middle?

This sounds more like an annoyingly lengthy road trip than the grand, celestial repository of all human history. Still, our puny “planet” is dense with an unmined narrative. There is no such thing as an ordinary day. The mission is to lift the veil on the awesome and meaningful strangeness that comprises waking life. I like that. A lot.

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Gabe Saglie – Gabe Saglie has been covering the Santa Barbara and Central Coast wine industry for more than 20 years. The former KEYT weathercaster is also senior editor for Travelzoo and, as such, is an on-air travel contributor and consumer advocate for media outlets across the country. When he’s not sipping, Gabe cooks, bikes, and travels with his family – wife, Renee, and children Gabriel, Greyson, and Madelyn.

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Editor’s letter Hidden Treasure in the Foothills

M

y favorite local celebs fly beneath the radar. Case in point: Natalie Portman.

Turns out for years she owned an architecturally significant home in the 93108 by the legendary local architect Barton Myers, but didn’t suck up more than her fair share of oxygen or carbon and we didn’t really know she was here till after she was long gone. Natalie, we hardly knew ye!

Montecito has long been that enclave where the noteworthy do their best to go by unnoticed. And we, in turn, do our best to un-notice them. With the possible exception of this issue.

This issue of the Montecito Journal Glossy features a number of such un-noticed notables with strong Montecito vibes: the Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville, one of the most revered guitar virtuosos Steve Postell, and one of the most environmentally minded Santa Barbarans we’ve met yet, the all-time most successful writer-producer-director James Cameron.

Like Portman, we didn’t really know about Cameron’s 25-plus years here till he recently listed his 100-acre spread for sale in Hollister Ranch. Only after we spoke to Jim did we learn that – not only did he incubate both Avatar scripts there, he also developed a thriving school with his wife, Suzy Amis, brilliantly workshopped and developed multiple technologies for film, and even put his ballast behind some submarine designs while biding his time on the Pacific promontory. Is there something in the water in Santa Barbara North County? Sounds like Jim’s been putting Hollister Ranch through its paces!

Few notables know more about eschewing the spotlight than free range Montecito-raised Morgan Neville. In fact, Morgan’s Oscar-winning documentary 20 Feet from Stardom is an homage to those just beyond

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the spotlight: backup singers. If Morgan’s name rings a bell, that’s because he also did the Anthony Bourdain doc Roadrunner, the Fred “Mr.” Rogers doc, Montecito’s Hill House doc This Is Not a House, and a new documentary soon to debut about another sometimes Montecitan known as Steve Martin. Morgan Neville’s reminiscences of the Montecito he grew up in are unique and priceless.

Still jonesing for more local lore? Then read our profile of soft-spoken but epic musician (singer, songwriter, guitarist, composer) Steve Postell, who has worked with everyone from Jackson Browne, Jeff Bridges, Michael McDonald, and David Crosby to James Taylor, Kenny Loggins, Carole King... the list goes on (and on).

No issue of the glossy would be complete without our normal embarrassment of riches when it comes to local talent: Cassandra Dias does next-level embroidery and shows us there’s always loom at the top. We look at the seasonal Santa Barbaran known as President Reagan, and the Little Launch Pad That Could known as Vandenberg Space Force Base.

And of course heading into the holidays, we’re always pleased to familiarize you with the stories of so many great local retailers: design forward Occhiali eyewear, Silverhorn Jewelers, and Daniel Gibbings – along with many, many others.

Happy holidays, everyone! Be safe and see you next year!

Gwyn Lurie

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Morgan Neville Curates Our Culture

By Les Firestein

I

met the Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville because he was working on a film about the architecturally significant Hill House at the same time I was working on a similar story for the Riv. Eventually we found ourselves in conversation at the premiere of Morgan’s This Is Not a House doc. I knew Morgan Neville was one of a handful of documentarians you could name. What I didn’t know is he grew up three houses from me in Montecito. The auteur and polymath behind massive hits like 20 Feet From Stardom and the Mr. Rogers doc Won’t You Be My Neighbor? actually was my neighbor.

Les: Why don’t we start with your new movie that’s about to be released by Apple+. Because I know it’s a very big story that involves some well-known people and world renowned homes, but it’s also a very Montecito story. Do I have all this correct?

Morgan Neville: It’s a two-part documentary about the performer and sometimes Montecitan Steve Martin. One part is about the comedian we all think we know – Les: The banjo-playing, arrow-through-the-head guy.

Morgan: Yes, and the other part is really about everything but Steve’s life as a performer – I’m talking about his life as a musician and magician and as an art aficionado and as just a generally thoughtful and fascinating person.

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Les: So Steve Martin is the connection to Montecito?

Morgan: The Montecito connection is actually more than just Steve. Martin at one point bought Montecito’s architecturally significant “Mud House” so we wound up doing some shooting up there. But, coincidentally, growing up in Montecito the Mud House was my best friend’s house. This crazy, brutalist masterpiece where, weirdly, I spent like half my youth.

Les: Sounds like you discovered a hole in the spacetime continuum. Must’ve been trippy.

Morgan: I think the Mud House is architecturally important but also important to Montecito. Because the Montecito I grew up in did not have a lot of new construction. It was basically a lot of old white elephant homes, beautiful places from the twenties and thirties and forties, but it was pretty sleepy at the time. And the fact that a house like the Mud House was even imagined and approved was incredibly unique. There are certain homes, of which Mud House was one and Hill House is another, where people wonder, how did this house ever get out of the ground?

Les: I know you weren’t born here. When did you get christened as a Montecitan?

Morgan: My family moved to Santa Barbara from Pasadena in the summer of ‘74. I went away to Thacher for boarding school, but MontecitoSanta Barbara was my home and my hometown, and it’s where I always came back to.

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2023

“If anything, I’ve gone in the direction of not trying to be all things to all people. Instead I try to be specific… and tell a story that gets to an essence. That’s how I like to do it.” Like Rodin, Neville chips away and removes everything that’s “not the sculpture.”

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2023

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Morgan Neville

“When Star Wars came out, we thought the Mud House was the perfect Death Star.

Brutalism lends itself very well to that.”

(photo by Jim Bartsch)

Les: How old were you when you took up residence here?

Morgan: Six or seven. We used to play and shoot Super 8 movies at my place in the Upper Village, or at Jesse’s place, the Mud House.

Les: Did you know at the time that Mud House was a special place? Did it feel architecturally significant – did it feel different than other people’s houses?

Morgan: It definitely felt different. I remember when Star Wars came out, we just thought, oh, the Mud House is the perfect Death Star. Brutalism lends itself very well to that.

Les: So then you did the documentary on the Hill House, which is kind of “Son of Mud House,” and which Bruce Heavin himself has described as an “evil villain lair.” That place also has a bit of a Death Star vibe. Although the architect chastised me to refer to it as an “earthship.”

Morgan: Okay so like the Hill House earthship, the Mud House was just a totally unique space. I mean, the coolest thing about it is its relationship to the terrain. The house is the hill in that house too, it kind of tucks into the hill in Young Neville in Montecito. Since he’s holding a beer let’s assume he’s 21.

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Morgan Neville

Morgan in his Montecito living room with “Hindu Stuntmen” bandmate Paul Gutierrez.

such a clever way, but then just disappears. There’s a really steep grass hill right by the living room. And I remember we used to ride our bikes down that, and I remember wiping out once, going down that hill and hurting myself. It was fantastic. Such a fun house to play around in. But as a kid, you don’t have any context for what to think of to understand how unique a place is. It just felt fun.

Morgan: We also used to ride our bikes down the Mud House’s sloped turf roof. It was a magical place and a magical time.

Les: Jesse told me about jumping off a balcony onto a couch below.

Morgan: At 14 when you jump off a balcony and don’t break anything, that’s the very definition of fun.

Les: I know that house! It’s still really beautiful and magical, there’s just more of it. I think they added wings to the original facade.

Morgan: Interesting, I’d love to see that. Whatever I’m working on, you end up going to certain cities or wherever – right now I’m in London a lot, but then suddenly you’re in New York a lot or Chicago or random places.

Les: Incredible. That’s like saying, “I grew up in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house, in fact we’d ice climb the waterfall when it froze in the winter.”

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Les: While your buddy Jesse grew up in the Mud House, where exactly were you?

Morgan: I grew up in a 1928 Spanish revival on Las Tunas.

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“The Anthony Bourdain movie was really hard. I didn’t even quite realize it until I started making it, but I was like, oh, I’m making a film about suicide.”

So in a way what you choose to work on helps determine where you get to go. And I thought, well, it’d be nice to reconnect with Montecito.

Les: Did Montecito seem enchanted to you growing up?

Morgan: Honestly? At the time I definitely didn’t appreciate it. Like every other Montecito kid I yearned to live in a big city with a cooler scene. But whenever I’m back here I think this is pretty much the idyllic place to have a childhood.

Les: Other than riding your bike off Mud House and jumping off the balcony, what did your idyllic youth entail?

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Morgan: My folks were real renaissance people, intellectuals and bohemians, and book lovers and collectors, so we had people like Hunter Thompson and Charles Bukowski over at the house with some regularity. Barnaby Conrad was over a lot. Barnaby started the Santa Barbara Writers Conference at the Cate School.

[Les’s note: Treat yourself to looking up Barnaby Conrad’s Wikipedia. “Barnaby Conrad was an American artist, author, nightclub proprietor, bullfighter, and boxer,” the wiki starts. He was also apparently “almost gored to death” by a bull as part of a charity event. Beware what you bid for at charity auctions!]

2023

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Morgan Neville

Les: Your mom would help you guys TP your neighbors’ homes?

Morgan: I mean there was a lot of beautiful architecture and lushness in Montecito but at the same time also a deeply creative firmament.

Les: Sure sounds like it.

Morgan: Henry Miller was in the ‘hood though he was never a house guest.

Les: When I spoke with your friend Jesse Alexander Jr., he still seems starstruck by your mom. What’s that all about?

Morgan: My mom looked like Lynda Carter, you know, Wonder Woman. And she was a lot of fun because she often acted more like one of us than a traditional mom. She was definitely all my friends’ favorite chaperone.

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Les: Jesse said your mom would do things like help you guys TP your neighbors’ homes?

Morgan: I’d rather not answer till we can learn the statute of limitations on TP-ing a house.

Les: Tell us more of what the Steve Martin thing is about.

Morgan: The first part is his standup career and him finding his voice, which is very much the model of what his memoir Born Standing Up is. And the second part is him today in his life, which is so removed from what his standup career was. And then trying to figure out how this ‘wild and crazy guy’ became the Steve Martin we know today, who’s a playwright, novelist, art collector. And it was really fun to do.

2023

Morgan Neville

Morgan: I’d rather not answer till we can learn the statute of limitations on TP-ing a house.

Les: Can we expect epiphany in there? Will it be surprising?

Morgan: I think so, because I mean, Steve’s always been a fairly private person, and this is definitely putting way more of his life in front of the camera than it has been before and being very open about things. I’m excited for people to see it because Steve’s such a protean character. There are a lot of sides to him. And I’m always interested in those who gravitate to Santa Barbara because it’s a unique place as well as my hometown.

Les: What was your project right before Steve Martin? The reason I ask is I just kept thinking about Roadrunner [Morgan’s posthumous documentary about Anthony Bourdain] which I saw day one, and I thought in a certain sense that must’ve been WINTER

a difficult project because the world you were marinating in then was in a state of mourning.

Morgan: It was really hard. I didn’t even quite realize it until I started making it, but I was like, oh, I’m making a film about suicide, which was just unavoidable. Part of the way I make films is I go in with no preconceptions and I talk to people. And I feel like that film is a reflection of my experience of making the film, of basically being a trauma therapist for a lot of people who are still processing a lot of big feelings about Tony. And I had the utmost respect for him, but I was also witness to the amount of hurt he caused in people. And I felt like I had to honor both those things.

So sure, it was hard. But I’m grateful for the experience, and I made connections and friendships with lots of people 2023

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Morgan Neville

“I always said about Roadrunner, it’s like, in no way is this the last word about Tony.

This is just the first word about Tony.” in the film that continue. One of his longtime directors said, well, you’re one of us now. You’ve been through the trenches too, in your own way.

Les: It sounds like you medicate yourself with different projects.

Morgan: It’s all therapy. And these things overlap too. If I’m working on things over a couple of years, I think of it more like cooking. I’ve got something simmering. I’ve got something about to boil, and generally I’m starting to shoot something while I’m still editing something else, and they feed off of each other in terms of what I’m thinking and feeling and kind of pivoting to.

Les: Did your Steve Martin film turn out to be an antidote to the darkness of the Bourdain story? Because I’ve worked with a lot of comedians, and so I know that there can be a lot of darkness there as well.

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Morgan: Of course it’s not all light and butterflies, but it was in many ways an antidote. I would’ve done it regardless. I mean, I was a huge Steve Martin fan as a kid, and I’ve been wanting to make a film about comedy for at least 15 years. And I came close a couple times, but just never found the right project. And this is the one that I said, oh, this is absolutely what I want to do. But also the fact that he wasn’t just a comedian, that he was into art and into music and all this other stuff that I care about, and his story isn’t tragic.

Les: Not unless he surprises us. And fingers crossed he doesn’t.

Morgan: In fact, I think his story actually has a happy ending!

Les: It sounds like you’ve crafted for yourself a very fun life.

Morgan: It is. It’s now 30 years since I started my first 2023

®

Morgan Neville

This is not Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bukowski. It’s David Chang, Morgan Neville, and Kate McKinnon. (Courtesy Morgan Neville)

“We had people like Hunter Thompson and Charles Bukowski over at the house with regularity.” documentary. And two weeks into the very first one I wrote to my folks and said, “This is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life.”

Les: How did you know so quickly?

Morgan: I knew instantly because documentary filmmaking isn’t just one thing, it’s a collection of things. It’s interviewing, and it’s visual, and it’s research, and it’s storytelling. It’s all these things you put together into something. And I feel like that’s what I love. Also, this is my own little theory: I feel like making a documentary is like a master’s degree. Meaning it takes a couple of years, you really learn a subject well, and I feel like that’s perfect for my attention span. It’s not a PhD, it’s not seven years of nonstop work, but it’s just one or two years – the perfect amount of time to really satiate your curiosity on a subject and then move on.

There are filmmakers who’ll spend 10 years making a film.

And, listen, I love some of those. But for me I love being 68

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iterative, and part of it I think is my journalism background of you do it and then you do it again, and you get more wisdom, I think, by doing more. And so I kind of think of it more like a journalist in that way, that you do the best job you can and you’ve got the deadline, and then you go on to the next thing.

Les: What was your journalism background, by the way?

Morgan: I worked in my high school paper and college paper. And then after school I went to work at The Nation and then moved to San Francisco, worked for a newswire service, Pacific News Service. And then I worked for Pacifica Radio, and I freelanced too. But then when I was 25, I started on my first documentary which was called Deliriously LA, which was a play on Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York – Les: So you were offering a counterpoint to this concept that Manhattan was the spiritual epicenter of American culture… or at least of the American arts scene.

2023

Morgan Neville

Morgan: Exactly. This concept that Southern California had a very different cultural vibe, but was every bit as important and valid.

Les: That was so daring, declaring yourself a documentary filmmaker back then. When you were 25, documentaries were not as robust a field.

Morgan: It wasn’t a field at all! In fact there was no way to even figure out how to make documentaries. I mean, there was no documentary business. It was basically PBS. Les: And yet you were saying to your parents, “I’m going to do this the rest of my life.”

Morgan: Yeah, I suppose there were films that were just starting to kind of hint at what documentaries could be.

Starting with Roger & Me and Thin Blue Line and films like that, that were coming out in ‘89, early nineties that I was excited about. The real thing that drew me to it was I’m a definite disciple of New Journalism. Those are the writers I loved. The Joan Didions and so forth, who were applying fiction storytelling techniques to nonfiction stories. I feel like that’s still what I’m doing.

Les: Well, I thought watching Roadrunner that your curation of that had to be a labor.

Morgan: Man. Talk about a giant hunk of marble that you have to remove stuff from. Just the sheer weight of material was intense. And to try and do something that wasn’t 10 hours, but was a digestible film. And in that way, I always said about Roadrunner, it’s like, in no way is 70

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this the last word about Tony. This is the first word about Tony. I think what that film became was a way of helping people understand a little bit more, make a little more sense out of why he was who he was and why he did what he did. Because that was the overwhelming sense I got from people when I started working on the film. There was this incomprehensibility about Tony and why he would’ve killed himself and it not making sense – I think that film is an act of public therapy, hopefully.

Les: Well, that’s definitely a public service.

Morgan: That’s how I thought about it. And I know a lot of people said it helped them in ways, but you never know. But again, any time you make a film about anybody who people feel such a personal relationship with, you’re always going to not do exactly what they want. They always want some version of what their version is of the person. And I think if anything, I’ve kind of gone in the opposite direction of not trying to be all things to all people, but just be as specific as I can. I think there’s a tendency in a lot of documentary work to be a little Wikipedia-ish, and I’m kind of in the opposite direction – I like to eliminate things to get to an essence.

Les: As Rodin said, “Chip away at everything that’s not the sculpture.”

Morgan: Yes. That’s basically what I do.

Les: Thanks so much for your time and insight.

Morgan: I’ll see you around the Upper Village.

2023

JAMES CAMERON

His Santa Barbara Exit Interview with Les Firestein

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All-Time Successful Director Lives by the Credo “Don’t Be a Tall Poppy”

I

n answer to the question, is James Cameron the quintessential Santa Barbaran? The most accurate answer is he probably was. That’s because the mega-hyphenate writer-director-producerscientist-engineer-submarine designer-Mariana Trench explorer and Reggio Emilia school founder has put his Central Coast personal Shangri-La up for sale now that he’s raised his family and written both Avatar movies there. Let someone else enjoy the Galapagos north of Goleta.

It’s easy to see how James Cameron and Parcel 89 at Hollister Ranch were a perfect match. Cameron checks all the same boxes as Santa Barbara: nature loving, understated, environmentally concerned – and obsessed with the water and natural beauty.

For a guy with a lot to brag about, Cameron is not showy. He cares deeply about human advancement and sustainability and the interaction between the two.

For many years Cameron’s “Parcel 89” in Hollister Ranch (as he affectionately and nondescriptedly refers to it) was the perfect vortex for the director-scientistexplorer’s wide-ranging studies and interests.

Yeah, Cameron’s spread is unspoiled and lush as few other acres on this planet are. But it also has a working subsistence farm, all sorts of mammalia roaming the free-est range to ever exist, and miles of isolated coastline that look like they once did not just before Europeans but before homo sapiens. Some time after God but before Darwin.

Interestingly, Hollister is also a great place to live out the dystopia if things go more “Terminator” than “Avatar” – which as of this writing is how things are trending. To this end, Parcel 89 has multiple helipads, and can sustain itself completely off grid thanks to highly advanced solar and wind generation.

The property also has every kind of well, both for agriculture and for the aforementioned homo sapiens and their support animals.

Yeah, it looks like Avatar but actually exists in Santa Barbara County

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Cameron and his wife, Suzy, check all the same boxes as Santa Barbara: nature loving, understated, environmentally concerned – and obsessed with the water and natural beauty.

Don’t Be a Tall Poppy

S

hould you decide to purchase, joining you in Hollister Ranch are like-minded neighbors like Yvon “The Earth Is Our Only Shareholder” Chouinard, the man who founded and gave away his company Patagonia in order to benefit the environment. But Cameron is quick to point out that the vibe inside Hollister is decidedly chill: “There’s an expression in New Zealand ‘Don’t be a tall poppy’ because the too tall poppy basically gets cut down.” Interestingly, the more legendary Cameron becomes, the more he seems to gravitate to non-celebrity culture.

When I ask Cameron why he’s selling after a quarter century chillaxing on one of the plum parcels on Earth, Cammy says Hollister was perfect when he was incubating kids and movies mostly in L.A. But now that the kids are out of the house, he’ll be spending even more time on an even more remote 2,500 acres of farmland – in the enviably hardto-get-to New Zealand.

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Looking back on his quarter century at Hollister Ranch, I ask Cameron what it all meant.

“That stretch of coast is magical,” says Cameron. “Sometimes we would helicopter but most of the time we’d drive up the coast and you could just feel the layers of stress peel away as we got further into nature and more connected to the land.

Frankly, you can’t go there and not feel deeply moved.”

I ask Cameron if Hollister offered him fertile environs for his imagination. “It’s a fertile environment for everything,” says the director. “And, yes, to answer your question, I wrote much of both Avatars there as well as other projects.”

I ask what made this particular enclave such a perfect incubator for the mythical worlds Cameron tends to create.

“First and foremost, Hollister is an incredible sanctuary,” says Cameron. “But for the worlds I try to conjure, there’s nothing like going down to the Gaviota Galapagos, and observing precisely how a certain bird takes flight, or hunts, or precisely how a whale breaches, or just watching the undisturbed surf.”

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It also has a working subsistence farm and miles of isolated coastline that look like they once did not just before Europeans but before homo sapiens. It’s Creation some time after God but before Darwin. with his wife Suzy Amis, big plant-based family dinners harvested on site earlier in the day, and tending to their subsistence farm. Cameron’s mind is too restless to simply be the Gardener of Eden.

“It’s true we have a couple of barns on the property that I use as workshops for submersibles, robotics, and camera systems for my deep ocean expeditions, because that’s how I like to relax – by engineering things.” Things like what, I ask.

“Sometimes it’s a piece of filmmaking equipment for a shot that’s not yet been attempted. And of course I’ve made lots of stuff for my obsession with oceanography.”

“Do you build submarines out here?” I ask. “Not the submarines themselves,” says Cameron, “but some of the equipment that goes into the submarines.” I ask James Cameron if he was aware there’s a meme out there comparing his highly sophisticated world-record-setting deep sea sub with the ill-fated overgrown cigar tube known 78

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as the OceanGate submersible. He says he hasn’t seen that particular post, but what makes a submarine great isn’t its equipment – it’s its engineering. “And we like to engineer things for the duration,” he adds.

If you’re interested in how James Cameron engineered Parcel 89 at Hollister Ranch, please contact: Emily Kellenberger (805) 252-2773.

Meanwhile, the director of the upcoming Avatar 3 and other absurdly ambitious projects is on to greener pastures.

If there is such a thing.

For details on Jim Cameron’s Parcel 89 at Hollister Ranch Here’s the QR link.

2023

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Carat and Stick

Ethical Diamonds and Recycled Gold is Bling We Can Get Behind

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Story by Jeff Wing

P

rior to its closeup, a diamond is a blob of pure carbon formed in unpleasant subterranean circumstances about 125 miles under your feet.

Extreme pressures and temperatures down there – 375 tons per square inch @ 2,200°F – create a nearly indestructible geometric latticework of carbon atoms, their overheated little elbows immutably linked at the electron. Following this fiery drama, the carbon clod patiently sits there for two billion years until a deep volcanic explosion of Kimberlite lava tears a conical tunnel upward to the Earth’s surface, the cooling carbon blobs dotting the hot sludge like raisins in a plum pudding. Sometime later there is digging, faceting, polishing, and Marilyn Monroe in a pink satin William Travilla gown singing with her arms outstretched. Are diamonds truly a girl’s best friend? Discuss.

Here’s the thing: the aforementioned vertical tunnels, called Kimberlite pipes, are comparatively rare; only 30 such viable “diamond geysers” are known to exist on Earth.

This degree of rarity – and the crazy market value conferred on the scarce and scattered elements we’ve come to regard as precious – can bring out the worst in us. Endemic corruption and exploitation around precious mineral and metal extraction have gifted us terms like “conflict diamond.” It’s getting better. Here’s a snapshot.

Jeweler, Patient, Soldier, Guy.

D

aniel Gibbings is a master jeweler and came to his craft in the usual way: grudging conscription in the South African army’s Special Services Bureau and a year-and-a-half in the Angolan bush; army reserve work patrolling Mozambique’s Limpopo river; and a nasty case of parasitic Bilharzia – acquired in the field by swimming in larvae-infested waters. By the time Gibbings finally made it to a hospital 1,200 miles away in South Africa’s capital, Pretoria, he was exhausted, miserable, and wretched. If someone had told him at that moment he would one day be working with diamonds, the helpless laughter may well have killed him.

Fast forward (as they say). Jumping the pond and discovering Santa Barbara in the early ’90s – via Boston and Portland, Maine – Gibbings opened and closed a couple of retail permutations before establishing his now-beloved shop on Montecito’s Coast Village Road in 2009. His jewelry design for years themed around found antiquities such as ancient coins and carvings; it was only 10 or so years ago that Gibbings added diamonds to his creative palette.

“I was approached by these guys that ran Forevermark, a subsidiary of the De Beers Diamond Consortium. They asked me to produce a collection of bridal pieces for them.” Gibbings was quickly discouraged at the arrangement’s overriding mercantile overtones. “I didn’t like all the pressure. I pulled out of it, kept the bridal stuff that I’d designed for them and just made it my own.”

Casting about for another diamond provider, Gibbings met Benjamin and Lyssa King. “I love supporting them, because they supported me back when I was starting out with the diamond work,” he says. “I buy their stones wherever I can, and they’re beautiful stones. Canadian diamonds just glow! They have this iridescence. And,” Gibbings adds, “they’re ethically sourced. There’s no funny business, and they come with their own certificate.”

At this writing, Gibbings is preparing to open a second front in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Why Santa Fe? “I came down and had a look. The creative energy, the cultural mix, the vibrant art scene – I fell in love with it.” A particularly brutal New England winter drove Gibbings to check out the Southwest on a desperate lark. That was 30 years ago. These things take time. Gibbings’ Santa Fe doors open December 1.

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Daniel Gibbings’ journey to jewelry was unorthodox – to our common benefit

Diamonds de Canada and the Mindful Mine

“T

here’s always been this opaqueness,” Ben King says of the diamond biz. “Where did the diamonds come from? Are they using child labor? Are they giving back to their communities?”

The spark-throwing glamor of an impeccably faceted diamond has always been at odds with the industry’s reputation for shadowy expedience. Underage labor, human rights abuses, environmental wreckage, and the channeling of profits to rebel groups bent on violent government overthrow – the diamond trade has long been haunted by its partly-cloudy backstory.

“We live in a difficult industry,” King says, “because diamonds are classified as actual currency by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC – part of the U.S. Treasury).”

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Meaning things or services can be literally paid for with fistfuls of stones, making transactions difficult to trace. This has been good for the bad guys. “The G7, the Kimberley Process, the World Diamond Council,” King says, enumerating a few of the space’s ethical watchdogs. “These entities have produced schemes that attempt to track the flow of diamonds.”

The main problem has always been the long, vulnerable route the stones have to travel between processing points.

“Rough” diamonds mined in one part of the world are sent to another for “manufacturing” – cutting, faceting, and polishing. “India does 95% of the world’s cutting and polishing,” King says. “So, a lot of the value for those diamonds escapes the country of origin and goes to India.”

Distance from the Debswana Jwaneng diamond mine in Botswana to India is about 4,700 miles, for instance. This is comparable to a Wells Fargo frontier bank run, the stagecoach racing across open prairie with highway robbers at every turn. Approximately.

Ben and Lyssa King founded Diamonds de Canada to address these issues of transport, to repair systemic inequities, and (just incidentally) to build a more efficient and ethical diamond curation model. Concentrating most elements of the production process in one place solves several of the trade’s perennial headaches. That consolidation also tends to address the nefarious side of the diamond industry. As can happen, an elegant solution emerged that seemed to address several issues at once. It was a diamond-studded eureka moment. “When we became aware of an amazing new technology that was being introduced, my wife and I took it upon ourselves to go up to Canada.” Go up to Canada?

2023

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“Manufacturing” a diamond turns a rarefied rock into an icon. (right) The DaVinci brings algorithmic perfection and efficiency to diamond-shaping.

Renaissance Machine: The DaVinci Diamond Factory

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ellowknife is a town about 285 miles below the Arctic Circle in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Since diamonds were discovered in the area in the ‘90s, the place has been anointed the Diamond Capital of North America™. Three large diamond mines dominating the area have had major effects on both the economy, and the regional conversation. In 2021, the Government of the Northwest Territories stamped the Kings’ company, Diamonds de Canada Ltd., as an “Approved NWT Diamond Manufacturer” (ANDM). The innovation that sent Ben and Lyssa King up there – and whose process improvement earned them that gov’t approval – is the DaVinci Diamond Factory (DDF), an automated, programmable diamond cutting-and-shaping system developed by Swiss laser innovators Synova SA. “The tech both saws and facets the diamond,” King marvels. He saw in the technology a way to bring the once-siloed manufacturing process out to the remote places where the stones are actually mined. The DDF’s paradigm-changing feature is to make locals in the mining zone actual players in the whole of the downstream manufacturing process. “We work with the Dene First Nation in Yellowknife, showing them how to scan and plan and cut the diamond,” King says. Diamonds de Canada also uses the imperishable block-chain technology to permanently and irrefutably tether the individual diamond to its original source.

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Diamonds are identical at the atomic level, but are otherwise structurally unique, thanks to the brutal geologic mayhem that crushes them into being. Diamonds de Canada scans the diamond’s singular internal pattern, links that pattern to a unique code, and micro-engraves that code on the diamond’s “girdle” – the indescribably minute space between the upper “crown” of the diamond and the lower portion, or “pavilion.” The code strips the diamond of thief-friendly anonymity while telling the story of its geological birthplace, similar to the soil “terroir” that gives a wine its origin story.

This has long been one of King’s pet desires: personalizing the diamond and applying to its provenance something of the minutiae the vintner lavishes on her fruit.

Perhaps not surprisingly, soldier-adventurer-fine jewelry artist Gibbings figures into this. “What we’re most excited about is working with Daniel – giving him diamonds from the three main mines in the Northwest Territory and talking about these distinct geological events. Frankly, it matters where the diamonds come from. You have different expressions of diamonds from different locations,” King says. “It is our passion, especially for the educated Montecito customer, to provide them an authentic story that gets them excited about connecting [their diamond] to the earth.”

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Silverhorn in-house master craftsman Noel Bendle at work on a commission. (below) Silverhorn is one of only a handful of European styled jewelry design studios in the country. (photos by Andrea Russell Photography)

Silverhorn Jewelers: All that Glitters is Refined

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oel Bendle is staring intently through some sort of jeweler’s loupe at an impossibly tiny task. Wielding unidentifiable tools with a neurosurgeon’s fevered concentration, the guy is toiling over a precious object so tiny I fear leaning in any further will smash my fool head through the glass. “Even amongst people who say they make the jewelry by hand, there are different methods,” Carole Ridding says matter-of-factly. She is co-founder, with husband Michael, of Silverhorn Jewelry – a restlessly original presence in the fine jewelry space since its far-flung beginnings in the Canadian Rockies nearly 50 years ago. “We don’t use CAD (computer-aided drafting) or any computer generation. We do it the old way. You sketch out something on a sheet of paper, take a piece of gold sheet or wire, and you manipulate it.”

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What an idea. Bendle is benefactor of a skill set that dates to when Alexander the Great was still in diapers. The European craftsman’s old-world authenticity is evident in the carelessly busy vibe of his space – a warm chaos of scattered jeweler’s flotsam and unnamable gadgets. But for the lonely gold ingot awaiting transfiguration, this could be a workbench in someone’s garage. Silverhorn’s German-born lead designer and his erstwhile compatriot behind glass, stone-setter magnifique Darby Farmer, work their concentrated magic for all Silverhorn visitors and clients to see. Where does Silverhorn get its gold? Well, in part from workbenches like Noel’s. “We only work with smelters that adhere to standards of purity,” Ridding says.

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The importance of highly specialized craftspeople is one of the keys to Silverhorn’s success.

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Designing a custom-made piece of jewelry is a collaboration between the designer and the client.

Painstaking hand-crafted work is Silverhorn’s signature. (photos by Andrea Russell Photography)

n my recent visit to Silverhorn, Bendle’s catchment and recovery system had been pointed out to me.

Any tiny bits or shards of gold made extraneous in the artist’s crafting of a piece are captured, packaged, and sent off to the smelter where, with the contributions of other post-consumer gold sources, the precious metal is refined through a process that exactingly removes impurities. Silverhorn purchases the pure, reconstituted ingots, Noel gets to work, and the cycle begins anew. “The idea is we’re sustainably recycling the gold, which we’ve been doing for a long time,” Ridding says. This is because it’s been estimated an average mine creates some 20 tons of waste to produce an 18-karat, 0.333-oz gold ring. And we can’t have that.

“Our suppliers have to follow ethical rules,” Ridding says.

“The American Gem Trade Association for Colored Stones, and of course the Gemology Institute of America, have a whole area devoted to that. People want that. Not just us and not just the customers. The suppliers, the dealers; we all want that.” To this end, stamped mention of the relevant regulatory body appears on all precious metals that come to Silverhorn.

It all comes down to Noel Bendle and Darby Farmer behind the glass at Silverhorn’s design studio on Montecito’s Coast Village Road, working rare, ethically sourced metal and stone to make standalone, award-winning, wearable 90

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art – Old World craftsmanship made flesh. Carole Ridding seems to see it that way, too. “It’s easy to throw words around: ‘Oh, it’s a handmade custom design,’ that kind of thing. But when you can actually come in and see how the craft is being executed...” Ridding smiles. “It’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it?”

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2023

A STITCH IN TIME TWEAKS THE PARADIGM CASSANDRA DIAS BRINGS IMPRESSIONISM TO NEEDLEPOINT

BY JEFF WING | PHOTOS BY ANTHONY DIAS

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anta Barbara native Cassandra Dias is an artist whose medium is turning heads – not because of transgressive work she is doing with masticated chewing gum, llama dung, or dead, surprised-looking animals encased in Perspex™. Dias’s groundbreaking art is whiplash-inducing due to its having transcended the reputational cul-de-sac in which her medium can be said long to have languished.

“Embroidery” is a word in our lexicon that summons either a full-body flush of elegiac gratitude, or the furrowed brow of a digital native to whom the metal hoop and colored string are as alarming as the Tycho Monolith was to Stanley Kubrick’s panicked apes. Dias is infusing needlepoint with a new Impressionist energy. The arcane tools of embroidery (the thimble, chenille needle, and angry-sounding “seam-ripper”) are – in this artist’s nimble hands – the brushes and paint whose textured strokes are redefining a form whose very mention was once a spoken soporific.

Here comes Dias now. Let’s interrogate: WINTER

Montecito Journal Magazine: Cassandra, many artists can cite a revelation, experience, or period in their lives when they first became aware of the very existence of “art.” Can you recall an early epiphany?

Cassandra Dias: Being born and raised in Santa Barbara, I developed a love for all forms of art at a very young age, thanks to my aunt who used to take me to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. I remember always marveling at the works on display there. I started taking art classes at La Colina Junior High, and continued my artistic studies when I attended San Marcos High School. I dabbled in oil painting, collage, ceramics, and crochet – before falling in love with my current focus, which is hand embroidery.

I’ve read you began your embroidery journey as recently as 2020. Is that accurate?

That’s accurate! I wanted to try to embroider a Harry Potter logo on my daughter’s denim jacket. I’d received a big bag of vintage DMC Mouliné embroidery floss from 2023

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my aunt, which I kept stored away in a closet for years. I thought I’d see if I could make more use of it. I googled basic stitches and tried out a couple of easy floral designs before shifting gears over to landscapes, which I thought would be more challenging. I absolutely fell in love with creating landscape pieces and haven’t looked back since.

How have you managed to master this striking, painterly approach to embroidery?

I started off using mostly the satin stitch in my earlier pieces. I soon got tired of my completed works having such a smooth surface, so I started to incorporate French knots to give the pieces a little more dimension. I wanted even more texture, though. I thought about what I could do to achieve the sort of look I was going for and decided to try combining my love of painting with this new love for embroidery. That’s when I started trying out the thread-painting technique, which was about six months into my embroidery journey. Thread painting is an intuitive hand-embroidery technique where you use freely placed short and long stitches to blend your colors together in order to achieve a realistic look that is similar to a painting.

Apart from your technique, of course, your eye is amazing. Were you working in another medium before you applied yourself to embroidery? What is your background in the actual practice of visual art?

Thank you! I’ve been into art since I could hold a Crayon. I took formal art classes in junior high and high school, which included painting, collage, and ceramics. After college, I branched out and learned crochet and basic silk-screen printing, and opened an Etsy shop where I sold those handmade items. I had never really considered myself an “artist” until this past year, partly because – while growing up – it had been put in my head that being an artist wasn’t a smart life choice. I’ve come to realize I don’t think I could be anything else. It’s just who I am to my core.

How long does it take you to complete a piece?

It depends on the piece itself, but typically if I’m able to work at my leisure, one of my pieces takes about two months to complete. If I’m working on a commission, I give myself a deadline of about five weeks and am able to finish it within that time frame.

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I see you have a commission request form online. Do you do a lot of commissions?

I started accepting commissions several months ago, mainly because I felt like I was in a slump and was struggling to find inspiration. I thought that having people submit requests for custom pieces with their own ideas would help me find my drive again… and it worked! Hearing their stories about why the places were special to them really 2023

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EMBROIDERY IS NOT JUST FOR THE ROCKING-CHAIR SET, THANKS TO THE CUTTING-EDGE NEEDLERY OF ARTISTS LIKE DIAS.

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1 2 6 6 C OA S T V I L L AG E R OA D | M O N T E C I TO | 8 0 5 . 7 7 0 . 7 1 7 0 | C A L DW E L L S N Y D E R .C O M S A N F R A N C I S C O | S T. H E L E N A | M O N T E C I T O | J O H N E VA N S | R I V E R | 6 0 X 4 8 I N C H E S | O I L O N C A N VA S

connected me to the process again. I feel truly honored that each potential client trusts me to create a piece that means so much to them. I try to accept new commissions monthly when time allows. Because of how much work goes into creating my embroideries, I have very limited space available at a time.

Would you describe embroidery as an evolving art form with plenty of room for innovation? Where do you see your own work going as you move forward?

Yes, definitely! I admit – when I first started embroidery, I had only pictured it being a very old-fashioned pastime with not a lot of room for creativity. But as I learned more about the craft, I connected with some pretty inspiring needlework artists through social media. I realized there is so much you can do with embroidery, and there are lots of ways to elevate the basic stitches to whole new levels – and into true works of art. As for my own work, I do feel like a shift may be coming soon. I’m not exactly sure how I will change things up yet, but I do know that I am never content doing the same thing for too long. I’ve been wanting to create larger-format pieces for a while now, so we’ll see.

WWW.CASSANDRAMDIAS.COM

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NASA SWOT mission launches from Vandenberg.

(Photo: Airman 1st Class Kadielle Shaw)

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WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON AT VANDENBERG SPACE FORCE BASE? While rumors swirl of ET crafts, an impending Mars expedition, and walled-off Bond-like hangars, the enigmatic Vandenberg Space Force Base is now home to the world’s most ambitious climate monitoring tech: SWOT. STORY BY ROB HILL

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n the chilly and damp early evening of February 23, 1942, the once-unthinkable happened off the coast of Goleta, California: The Imperial Japanese Navy submarine I-17, under the command of Commander Kozo Nishino, surfaced and began to open fire on the coastline. Dubbed the Bombardment of Ellwood, the incident triggered bomb sirens, a mandatory blackout, and a curfew. It was the first time World War II had encroached on the mainland of America. Although not widely known at the time, a total of seven Japanese submarines had been playing cat-andmouse with the U.S. Navy from Hawaii to the West Coast.

At first blush, the attack made no strategic sense. However, when looking at Commander Nishino’s pre-war background, there was a clue: Nishino was the captain of a merchant ship that regularly sailed through the Santa Barbara Channel and refueled at the Ellwood Oil Field. Was this his intended target? Or was there something else afoot?

There is some indication that the Japanese had gotten wind of a mysterious “base” that was being built among the coastal sage scrub and oak wilderness that sprawled for 80,000 acres over desolate ranch lands, canyons, and mountains between Lompoc and Santa Maria. What didn’t seem to make sense to the Japanese high command was why the Army would be building such a gargantuan base in an

area so remote and craggy with no ostensible strategic importance. Was the I-17 on a mission to get a peek at this clandestine base under the cover of bombing a minor oil refinery? This was just the first of many rumors and chatter surrounding Vandenberg Air Force Base that, in one form or another, continues to this day. To be sure, this has been rekindled when President Trump created the Space Force in 2020 and the base was renamed the Vandenberg Space Force Base. In addition, Elon Musk began leasing two pads on site to launch SpaceX rockets.

Opened in October 1941, the base was originally called Camp Cooke, an homage to Major General Philip St. George Cooke, an American war hero who fought in the Mexican War, Indian Wars, and Civil War. On the surface, the former homeland of the Chumash Indians was simply a troops training depot. But the locals had vivid imaginations.

Rumors swirled: A mysterious weapon was being constructed there; high-value Nazi POWs and spies were being held there; it was built because the Japanese were planning to attack the coast; a rough-and-tumble prison was there housing traitorous soldiers that went MIA. Some of this later became fact, some were half-truths, while a lot has remained classified. But one thing was for sure: The Vandenberg Air Force Base brought a big whiff of gossip and thaumaturgic lore to the sleepy coastal town.

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SWOT’S HAPPENING AT THE BASE

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ast forward to today, and it’s back to the future. Before the Space Force even got its barracks set up, the town swirled with conspiracy theories about what was really going on at the base. However, under the radar of the populace, another more unlikely program – SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) – was being hatched there. Run

by NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the California Institute of Technology, SWOT builds on a long-standing partnership between NASA and CNES (the French National Centre for Space Studies) to measure the surface of the ocean using radar altimetry.

SWOT was built to make the first global survey of the Earth’s surface water, to observe the fine details of the ocean surface topography, and to measure how terrestrial surface water bodies change over time.

It provides insights into the ocean’s influence upon climate, how a warming world affects lakes, rivers, and reservoirs, and how communities can better prepare for natural disasters.

Headed up by Payload System Engineer Dr. Nacer Chahat, SWOT has an important mission. Born in Angers, France, Chahat has spent his career working on satellite communications antennas for spacecraft and radio astronomy instruments. Chahat has been at JPL for more than 10 years. “Working for NASA is a dream for every kid, but this was not something I even thought was possible,” he said. “I was lucky to work on multiple one-of-a-kind space missions. For example, MarCO, which provided real-time communications to Earth for InSight during its entry, descent, and landing (EDL) on 26 November, 2018.”

As part of his engineering job for SWOT, Chahat is in charge of qualifying the payload while it was at JPL to deliver it to their partners in France for integration with the bus. “Once in France, my role was to define all the electrical tests for the payload to ensure its full qualification with the bus,” he noted. However, his job also comes with the burden of resolving any anomalies that arise. The payload includes all of the satellite’s instruments: the Ka-band Radar Interferometer instrument, a GPS science receiver, a laser retroreflector, and a two-beam microwave radiometer. “When you have so many instruments with high-power transmitters and sensitive receivers, things need to be properly designed and tested so as to avoid self-compatibility issues,” Chahat says. “One of our big tests was the EMI/EMC self-compatibility test, where all instruments are on in an anechoic chamber. We passed this test with flying colors both at the payload level and at the spacecraft level despite the unprecedented complexity of the satellite.”

To be sure, SWOT is a game-changer. SWOT will help generate a much more complete picture of Earth’s water budget thanks to its unprecedented high-definition view of freshwater bodies. In fact, the spacecraft’s instruments will observe the entire length of nearly all rivers wider than 330 feet, viewing them in three dimensions for the first time. According to Chahat, it is important to realize that ground and satellite technologies currently provide data on only a few thousand of the world’s largest lakes, but SWOT will expand that number to more than a million lakes larger than 15 acres.

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A rendering of the SWOT mission’s satellite orbiting Earth.

(Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CNES/Thales Alenia Space) WINTER 2023

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ountries without satellite capabilities or funds for measurements will be able to access this data and learn more about their own country. The data will be available for free to anyone around the world. “SWOT data will be used to monitor drought conditions in lakes and improve flood forecasts for rivers,” says Chahat. “This provides essential information to water management agencies, disaster preparedness agencies, universities, civil engineers, and others who need to track water in their local areas.

Earth’s seas have absorbed more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere. To improve climate forecasting, our scientists would like to understand at what point the ocean slows down this absorption of heat and starts releasing it back into the air. (This is when it could accelerate global warming.) The crucial information about this global ocean-atmosphere heat exchange will help researchers test and improve climate forecasts.”

In addition, the satellite will help fill gaps in researchers’ picture of how our sea level is changing along coastlines, offering insights that can then be used to improve computer models for sea level rise projections and the forecasting of coastal floods. “Just look at the pictures,” Chahat gushes. “SWOT outshines the combined data from seven altimetry satellites with a spatial resolution improved by a factor of 10. It is absolutely outstanding.”

Even with SWOT and SpaceX in full swing and transparent, Vandenberg still conjures up fantastical prattle. Recently, Officer Robert Jacobs, who worked at Vandenberg in the 1960s and ’70s as a first lieutenant, claimed that he witnessed what appeared to be Images from NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite show the Suwannee River an “ET craft” turn off a nuclear warhead mid-flight. where it meets the Gulf of Mexico along Florida’s Big Bend.

Jacobs asserted that he was watching the footage of (Photo: NASA/USGS/A. Alonso) the September 15, 1964 nuclear test launch when, out of nowhere, a strange disc darted into the frame, quickly hunting down the warhead while shooting a series of “beams” at it before vanishing. Miraculously, the deactivated warhead toppled out of the sky with a mere whimper. Not launch from the base. According to writer Tyler Rogoway, to be outdone, today there’s the question of what, exactly, the who has toured the base and written about it extensively, Space Force’s mission is. One of the more outlandish but popSLC-6 has been quietly used by multiple defense contracular theories in the alternative media is that the Space Force, tors over the years. But by the early 2000s, a legend began right out of a Star Wars movie, is training on-base with friendly to stir that the complex was cursed. After many billions of ET’s for the battle against negative ET’s (the Galactic Empire), dollars had been poured into the installation, there appeared who are terrorizing the galaxy. Others believe that Space Force to be little to show for it. According to records, in the midis more of an anti-cyber attack security eye-in-the-sky outfit: 2000s, Boeing took over the facility for its Delta IV rocket The cyber wardens for Earth. program. However, in the last few years, locals have been reThen there’s the cryptic structure – Space Launch Complex porting strange-looking aircraft zig-zagging about and then 6 (SLC-6) – to the south of the base’s astounding 15,000-foot disappearing – slick, shiny, bat-winged beasts patrolling the runway. Cloaked behind towering security fencing, the shadsky one minute, then, poof, gone. Is this why the runway is owy complex has been dubbed “something right out of a James an unprecedented 15,000 feet? Finally, there’s chatter in the Bond movie.” The official line is that it’s a hangar for USAF’s aerospace community that the base will be Ground Zero for space shuttle. The problem is, there’s never been a space shuttle a manned mission to Mars.

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s to all this, Chahat remains mum – except when it comes to Mars. He offers a few cryptic breadcrumbs. “I am now helping multiple flight projects in operation or in development,” he said. “I was part of the small team of engineers who formulated and designed the Mars helicopter mission. I have continued to support the team by improving the surface propagation tool to ensure continuous and reliable communication between the Rover and the helicopter. I am also helping the Mars sample return mission with the two helicopters we are developing.”And, no, he hasn’t met Elon Musk – yet!

The first West Coast Delta IV Heavy Launch Vehicle launching from Space Launch Complex-6.

(Photo: U.S. Air Force photo/Joe Davila)

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Col. Anthony Mastalir and Maj. Gen. Deanna Burt unveil Vandenberg’s new U.S. Space Force name.

(Photo: U.S. Space Force/Michael Peterson)

FOREST STEARNS: PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS AN ORBITAL MATISSE

BY JEFF WING PHOTOS COURTESY OF FOREST STEARNS

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orest Stearns puts artwork on spaceships – the kind that deafeningly lift off on a controlled column of hellfire. “I met a gentleman who had a satellite company with two spaceships in orbit at that time. After hearing him talk for an hour, I approached him and wondered aloud if a graffiti writer had ever added artwork to a spaceship.” The aerospace fellow met the question with puzzled eyebrows. “Robbie,” said the gregarious Stearns, “…you know those World War II bombers with pinup girls painted on them?” “Yes,” the space entrepreneur hesitantly answered. “Let’s paint your satellites,” Stearns said. Somehow this mad pitch worked.

Rather than “pinup girls,” the Planet Labs orbiters feature Stearns’ collective homage to nature – a more fitting theme for the Earth-observing fleet.

“I had the opportunity to put art on hundreds of satellites, a few rockets, and some radio domes,” Stearns continues. “We effectively created the first art show in space.” In 2017, Stearns’ artwork exalted the stage-3 outer hull of a Minotaur-C rocket launched from Vandenberg.

Stearns is founder and principal artist of an Oakland-based outfit called DRAWEVERYWHERE. Masterfully doodling on a spaceship is one way to actualize the company name.

Stearns takes the long view.

“All the way back to cave artwork and self-adornment, humans have been about celebrating their stories through making marks. So I am in a long line of humans that draw on things.”

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DAY TRIP TO VANDENBERG SFB

BY GABE SAGLIE

WHERE TO STAY: WINSTON HOTEL

WHERE TO EAT: BAR LE COTE

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n just over two years, Bar Le Cote has become a premium dining spot in the Santa Ynez Valley. The hook?

Seafood – a heavy slant toward the fresh catch of every day off the Central Coast. The star dishes, which include everything from crudos, clams, and caviar to classics like octopus, sea bass, and branzino, are usually line-caught or dry-aged. Food is complemented by a diverse list of wines from Santa Barbara County and Mediterranean Europe. Located in downtown Los Olivos and open for lunch and dinner, the restaurant is helmed by the wifeand-husband team of Daisy and Greg Ryan, who also own the popular Bell’s restaurant in nearby Los Alamos. Bar Le Cote earned a coveted recommendation in the 2023 Michelin guide, one of only four in the SYV to earn the accolade. It’s closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

Barlecote.com.

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WHERE TO SIP WINE: THE LOMPOC WINE GHETTO

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n the outside, The Winston Hotel exudes quintessential Solvang charm, with its red, Danish-inspired clocktower façade. But the interior tells a different story, a modern story where sleek, eclectic design, and colors that pop set the stage for a stylish respite. The décor differs from room to room; the clocktower itself houses a large suite with a grand entry foyer and separate seating area. The approach here is decidedly hands-off: There’s no lobby, so check-in is done with unique access codes delivered through text. There’s no hotel bar either, but rather a private, guest-only honor bar that’s stocked regularly. The Winston does offer a prime downtown location, putting guests walking distance from Solvang’s top eateries, tasting rooms, and shops. Thewinstonsolvang.com.

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he downtown location of many of Lompoc’s wineries, especially a collective of outlets known as the Wine Ghetto, is prime take-off viewing positioning.

“Launches are very audible and visible from our tasting room,” says Tara Gomez, winemaker and co-owner at Camins 2 Dreams (camins2dreams.com), a boutique winery that specializes in small-lot productions of Syrah and Grüner Veltliner, among others. “They literally shake everything on the walls!” At nearby Flying Goat Cellars (flyinggoatcellars.com), winemaker Norm Yost’s vehicle for premium pinot noir and sparkling wines, being able to sip on the front patio while waiting for liftoff is an asset, “since launches frequently have a launch time window that can keep you waiting for hours,” says co-owner Kate Griffith. Flying Goat offers “unobstructed viewing for launches from both South and North bases,” she adds.

To be accurate, though, most Vandenberg launches take place overnight, outside the business hours for Wine Ghetto tasting rooms.

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WHERE TO SHOP: ZFOLIO

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THE FABRIC MERCHANT

he “Z” refers to Zdena Jiroutova, who opened her first retail shop in Solvang in 2006, along with her husband, Michael Mendizza. Today, the store, set along the Danish town’s main drag, Copenhagen Drive, stocks a snapshot of a plethora of jewelry and design items that the couple feature online. The focus on art glass is a nod to the longstanding glassmaking traditions in her native Czech Republic; the stunning pieces include bowls and plates, vases, and sculptures. Shoppers can browse through a large jewelry collection, too, such as rings, bracelets, and necklaces. ZFolio has a second location on Cannery Row in Monterey, which opened in 2009. Zfolio.com.

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WHERE TO BE WELL: CHUMASH CASINO SPA

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ike a kid in a candy store – it’s a phrase that well applies to any fan of all things fabric who comes to this textiles haven. It’s the brainchild of Irene Salas, who leveraged decades of international buying and design experience to open up a destination designs shop in the heart of downtown Los Olivos. There are myriad vintage fabrics, and premium linens are sold by the yard. Shoppers can also peruse a rotating selection of jewelry and clothes, as well as globally sourced housewares like area rugs and embroidered pillows.

Ms. Salas also consults on customers’ custom projects. facebook.com/FabricMerchant.

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he Chumash Casino Resort, located adjacent to the historic town of Santa Ynez, offers one of the most comprehensive spa experiences in the county. Flanked by the onsite AAA 4-Diamond hotel and popular 24-hour casino, the spa features seven treatment rooms and two couples’ suites outfitted with copper soaking tubs. There are also saunas and steam rooms, and the outdoor communal area features a mineral pool, a cold plunge, and whirlpool. The spa menu features all the classics: various 50- and 80-minute massages, which can be enhanced with treatments like light therapy CBD tub soaks, and skincare services that range from microdermabrasion to hydrafacials. Short on time before heading out to see the next Vandenberg launch? There are various 25-minute express services, including scalp and foot massages. The spa is closed Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Chumashcasino.com.

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3055 Padaro Lane $63,000,000 Riskin Partners Estate Group

89 Hollister Ranch Road $33,000,000 Emily Kellenberger & Associates

303 Meadowbrook Drive $11,495,000 Marcy Bazzani

767 Las Palmas Drive $8,995,000 James Sanchez & Aaron Gilles

4508 Foothill Road $8,750,000 Grubb Campbell Group

1975 Inverness Lane $7,995,000 Riskin Partners Estate Group

LOCALLY OWN ED | G LO BALLY C O N N ECT ED | VILLAG ESIT E .C OM | D RE 01206 7 34 MON TEC ITO 805.96 9 . 8 9 0 0 | SAN TA BARBARA + MESA 805 . 6 81. 8800 | SANTA YNEZ 805 . 6 88. 1620 All information provided is deemed reliable, but has not been verified and we do not guarantee it. We recommend that buyers make their own inquiries.

HOM E I S OU R FAVORITE DESTINATION

929 Canon Road $7,185,000 Doré & O’Neill Real Estate Team

390 Woodley Road $5,500,000 Grubb Campbell Group

8107 Buena Fortuna Street $4,750,000 Emily Kellenberger & Associates

1493 Sycamore Canyon Road $4,495,000 Aaron Gilles

1215 Miracanon Lane $4,275,000 Grubb Campbell Group

2101 Mountain Avenue $3,895,000 Sener Jones Associates

OCCHIALI

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SEEING IS BELIEVING IRWIN & SALLI EVE CAME HERE 40 YEARS AGO WITH A VISION TODAY THAT VISION IS MORE FOCUSED THAN EVER

BY JOURNAL STAFF PHOTOS BY KIM REIERSON

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he popular TV show Cheers was a workplace comedy that celebrated the lively attitude and warm camaraderie in a downstairs bar in Boston. In modern day, one real life equivalent of Cheers might be considered the Occhiali eyewear boutique in Montecito.

Occhiali opened its doors in January 1988, almost 36 years ago. The shop has spanned generations, caring for our community with old world service and cutting-edge fashion.

The moment you enter the store, the optician greets you with a warm smile and makes you feel welcomed. They provide excellent guidance and advice on which frames would best suit your face shape and personal style. Throughout the process, the optician takes time to educate on different options available and the benefits of each one.

Their clients come in sometimes just to chat and share stories. You often see your friends shopping and then it becomes a gathering spot. Owners Irwin and Salli Eve and their staff try to show each client they are valued and often greet each client by name.

Our community has gone through some difficult experiences; this was a shop where residents came in and shared their stories – a meeting place. Often, you will find Violette Bakeshop cupcakes to enjoy while in the shop.

One recent incident meant a lot to Irwin. A longtime client passed away a few months ago. A short time later, his lovely wife and her dear friend visited the shop to perform a small celebration for her husband. She had a small shovel and a box of his ashes.

She asked Irwin to step outside to the garden area (in front of the store) and she dug a hole to place a bit of his ashes. She was determined to go to all the places her husband cherished to spread his ashes.

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THE SANTA BARBARA CONNECTION: VITAMIN SEA MEETS VITAMIN SEE

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alli and Irwin met more than 40 years ago as students at UCSB, where Salli was doing graduate work as an audiologist – she was inspired to study hearing because she had a niece who was born deaf. Irwin was a senior undergraduate also in the Speech and Hearing department. Irwin was assigned to observe Salli administering her clinical practicum and they quickly became a couple.

When Irwin completed his program, he attended the University of Tennessee for his graduate work.

With both audiology degrees, they landed in Philadelphia working in hospitals.

They continued their education attending night school outside of Philly studying ophthalmic science. This morphed into a mentorship in one of the first designer eyewear stores in the entire U.S. called Optique in the Rittenhouse Square of Philadelphia. The Optique owners took them to New York to meet the independent designers, including Larry Leight, who had just introduced his new eyewear collection Oliver Peoples. This collection became a strong foundation for their concept and direction.

“When we first met Larry, Oliver Peoples wasn’t really a thing, and designer eyewear wasn’t even a thing – Larry just had a couple of pairs of glasses, albeit nice ones, set up on a card table at a trade show,” recalls Salli. “Fortunately, that chance meeting turned into us becoming the Santa Barbara distributor of a very nascent Oliver Peoples.” Adds Irwin, “We were thrilled to return to Santa Barbara and have never looked back.”

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SEEING IS BELIEVING

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ince returning to Santa Barbara, Irwin and Salli’s engagement with the community has been anything but myopic; in fact, it’s been deep and wide. Yes, there’s their store, which has always been a keystone to the Santa Barbara end of Coast Village Road. But in addition, Salli has been a performing arts teacher at Anacapa School – belying a love of theater she has always shared with her husband. In turn, Salli’s love of theater was fruitful and magnified in their daughter Samantha, who founded Out of the Box Theatre Company in Santa Barbara in 2009.

Out of the Box is a not-for-profit theater company dedicated to bringing edgy, contemporary musicals to the Santa Barbara stage – utilizing as much local talent as possible. Because we all love Guys ‘n’ Dolls, but really, how many times can we see it? At Out of the Box, you can see such avant-garde fare as Reefer Madness, the Musical, Green Day’s American Idiot, or coming very soon, Alice By Heart from the award winning creators of Broadway’s Spring Awakening.

Like her parents, Samantha Eve believes her work enhances the Santa Barbara community by bringing them new and exciting works. Most fortunately, she has been the beneficiary of some wonderful mentorship by the legendary Santa Barbara philanthropist Michael Towbes.

When first starting out, Mr. Towbes advised her on the important aspects of grant writing and what steps to take to become a long-lasting nonprofit organization. She is proud to produce her 25th show this season.

VISION QUEST

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rwin and Salli travel the world to source out beautiful, new, handcrafted eyewear collections.

Irwin reports there has been a growth of new independent eyewear designers who are rocking it, with beautiful quality and artistry. These small manufacturers in France, Italy, Japan, and even the U.S. are taking pride in their collections. Just returning from Paris early October, they were excited to introduce and premiere a new eyewear collection from Belgium called Komorebi and from France an exclusive line of glasses worn by (and licensed by) the estate of the iconic actor Steve McQueen. Salli and Irwin’s recent trip to SILMO (the Paris international eyewear show) was highlighted in meeting with many designers, such as Jean Philippe Joly, Nathalie Blanc, Gai Gherardi, and the Francis Klein sisters). (top) Rocky Horror Picture Show from Out of the Box Theatre Company (middle) Salli and Samantha Eve (bottom) Irwin Eve

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NO W

OP EN

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SEASONAL SOIRÉES SANTA BARBARA’S EVENING COUTURE 1880-1980

BY ERIN GRAFFY PHOTOS COURTESY OF SANTA BARBARA HISTORICAL MUSEUM

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ver at the Santa Barbara Historical Museum (SBHM), a new exhibit is gracing the gallery: “Seasonal Soirées: Santa Barbara’s Evening Couture 1880-1980.”

The century of high fashion was curated by former SBHM Board President Sharon Bradford, who previously lent her passion to the popular exhibit “West Dressed Women” – showcasing what women wore during the 19th and early 20th centuries, culled and curated from the museum’s vaults.

Now Bradford brings in the little black dress – before it was little or black – as styled by top designers over the past 10 decades.

At first blush, Santa Barbara may seem too small and provincial to be associated with a culture of couture. True, the town may not be Paris, Milan, or New York, but Santa Barbara does have a few fashion statements to make.

To start out, a footnote: This is the town that launched the career of Salvatore Ferragamo more than a hundred years ago. So, keep that thought in mind.

At the other end of the century, we have Cuban American fashion designer Luis Estevez (the youngest to ever win the Cody Award). When he noted how many Santa Barbara women were traveling down to his design studio in Beverly Hills, he turned around and opened his couture closet on Coast Village Road.

Zoe de Salle Photo Collection: Zoe de Salle was one of the most respected New York couturiers of the 1930s and ‘40s. In the 1950s, she settled in Santa Barbara where she honed her passion for fashion photography.

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Waterhouse Gallery Introducing our Second Fine Art Gallery location.

1187 Coast Village Road 3b, Montecito, CA 93108 Representing distinguished Artists Peter Adams Rebecca Arguello Aldo Balding Ann Shelton Beth Bela Bacsi George Bodine Suchitra Bhosle Eli Cedrone Casey Childs Alezander Chistov John Cosby Steve Curry Nancy Davidson Rick Delanty Camille Dellar Ellie Freudenstein Rick Garcia Derek Harrison Wyllis Heaton Ray Hunter Sung Eun Kim Irene Kovalik Mark Lague Jeremy Lipking Kyle Ma Jim McVicker John Modesitt Craig Nelson Jesse Powell Ann Sanders Eric Slayton Matt Smith Ezra Suko Thomas Van Stein Hsin-YaoTseng Jove Wang Nina Warner Ralph Waterhouse

“Early Spring, Douglas Preseve” 30”x40” Original Oil Painting by Ralph Waterhouse

Waterhouse Gallery 1187 Coast Village Road 3b, Montecito, CA 93108 805-886-2988

Waterhouse Gallery Established 1984 La Arcada, 1114 State Street, Suite 9, Santa Barbara, CA 93101 805-452-1062

email art@waterhousegallery.com

www.waterhousegallery.com

SEASONAL SOIRÉES

Dress, c. 1955 by Fine Feathers of Montecito, located at 1470 East Valley Road.

The interesting story is that Santa Barbara has continually attracted wealthy, well-educated, sophisticated residents from the East Coast, Chicago, and Pasadena.

These women brought not only their beautiful clothes with them, but their taste for elegant things. These were well-traveled people, so if Santa Barbara did not feature a top designer creation, the ladies would go to a big city and bring one home to be shown at the next grand ball.

When dresses like this are shown at a historical museum, rather than a fashion museum, there is the fascinating benefit of considering the context – the times, places, and people upon which these dresses would be making their appearance.

A favorite of mine in the exhibit is the royal cerise, satin cocktail dress (c.1950) of Rosario Curletti.

We find this dress stunningly and eye-catchingly sexy – showing us a woman who must be confident, sure of herself and knows who she was and where she was going, when sporting this number at a local festive affair.

Now we know why: Curletti was a community leader, writer, author, historian, genealogist, and social columnist.

Curletti was also a descendiente (the great-great-granddaughter of First Family Ramona Carrillo) and was never married.

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Evening dress made of French lace, 1950 by Zoe de Salle.

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SEASONAL SOIRÉES

Empire Edwardian dress of 1912.

Bingo – that’s the gal for the gown.

Then we consider the Empire Edward dress of 1912. This white satin is sheathed in a fantastic embroidered net with pearl and crystal beaded trim, heavy lace on the bodice and sleeves, and draped softly with a graceful, alluring semi-train.

This is a work of art, and we learn that the gown was a couture creation of the Fox Company, the design house of the four Fox sisters in New York on 34th Street. (They were so exclusive, there was no sign on the door, and they never advertised. You just had to know who to know!)

Santa Barbara in 1912 was a small town of 13,000 people. But don’t let the size throw you off. There were two high-end beautiful hotels here: The Potter on Ocean Boulevard, and the Arlington on State Street. Both variously hosted European royalty, U.S. presidents, captains of industry, and international dignitaries.

When a grand ball or dinner was held at these locations, the well-dressed Santa Barbara woman would shimmer in this chemise as she made her entrance.

The 1890 black silk faille and white satin evening dress was designed by Charles Frederick Worth. He was considered to be the “father of haute couture” and founded the House of 132

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Time Honored Montecito Living

cito Living

“Casa Dorinda combines the magic of a historic estate, a lively social scene, and unparalleled private healthcare. Peace of mind has never been so inviting.”

e, a lively social scene, and never been so inviting.”

THE GRILL - CASA’S CASUAL DINING VENUE

Refined Retirement Living casadorinda.org | 805.969.8011

At Casa Dorinda, we work to foster a culture of understanding, acceptance of individual differences, and respect throughout our community. We recognize and embrace the diversity of our residents, their families, our team members, and Board members, while sharing a common CASUAL goal of cultivating DINING inclusion and collaboration.

THE GRILL - CASA’S VENUE Casa Dorinda is a private LifeCare community, type A CCRC, owned and operated by the Montecito Retirement Association, a nonsectarian, nonprofit, tax-exempt organization. State of California Licenses RCFE #421700160, SNF #050000112, CCRC Certificate of Authority #126.

SEASONAL SOIRÉES

Interestingly enough, there was one place one could buy certain designer dresses in Santa Barbara: I. Magnin, the high-end, luxury goods department store (established in San Francisco in 1876). Magnin actually opened its first location outside of San Francisco in Santa Barbara, with their boutique at the Potter Hotel in 1912. Magnin opened the doors to its full high-fashion department store in 1947 at 1415 State Street.

The Santa Barbara Historical Museum has thousands of pieces in its costume collection, with items ranging from shoes to shawls to suits to chapeaux.

The selection covers everyday wear to costumes to couture over three centuries.

“The reason we collect clothing, that is, the reason why clothing is so historically valuable to us,” explains Dacia Harwood, executive director of the Santa Barbara Historical Museum, “is that when people see the dresses on a mannequin, it instantly brings the time and the era and the people to life.

History comes alive.”

(Black dress) Silk faille dress, c. 1890 by House of Worth, Paris (Orange dress) Suit dress, c. 1970 by Mary McFadden.

Worth back in 1858 in Paris. In Santa Barbara, this would have been elegant attire appropriate for the banquet at the Arlington in honor of U.S. President Benjamin Harrison and Gov. Henry Markham after the citywide parade held during the day.

The sharp suit dress by Mary McFadden was a gift from longtime local resident Barbara Dobbins Ingram, who was a Conover “cover girl” model with an eye for fashion and model wear. (As a model, she was discovered by Howard Hughes and became an actress – Kitty Lee in The French Line.)

McFadden was a popular 20th-century designer, and her distinctive apparel showed the foreign influences of her extensive world travels. McFadden’s suit dress featured an Asian-inspired copper-colored palette, plissé short-sleeve top over matching plissé skirt in a more intense hue.

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SEASONAL SOIRÉES

Guest curator Sharon Bradford examines an Empire style silk satin dress, c. 1910

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Montecito Valley ESTATE GROUP

MASON RAY, TYLER KALLENBACH, CASEY KALLENBACH

Combining a substantial scope of experience in luxury real estate with an incomparable level of customer service, Montecito Valley Estate Group is a family run team with an impressive history of delivering remarkable results to each of our clients.

Through our rebranding process (from ‘Tyler Kallenbach’ to ‘Montecito Valley’), we wanted to capture the essence of Montecito’s past and weave it into our brand identity to pay homage to the rich history of our cherished community.

Tyler, Casey, Mason

MONTECITO VALLEY | MONTECITOVALLEY.COM | 805.695.2533 | DRE# 02021945 Compass is a real estate broker licensed by the State of California and abides by Equal Housing Opportunity laws. License Number 01991628. All material presented herein is intended for informational purposes only and is compiled from sources deemed reliable but has not been verified. Changes in price, condition, sale or withdrawal may be made without notice.

No statement is made as to accuracy of any description. All measurements and square footage are approximate. If your property is currently listed for sale this is not a solicitation.

175 Miramar Ave 4 BED | 4.5 BATH | 3,000 SQFT+/NEWLY OFFERED FOR $7,500,000 JUST SOLD SAN ANTONIO, OJAI $18,000,000

JUST SOLD 504 HODGES LN $3,250,000

Buyer Representation

Seller Representation

MONTECITO VALLEY | MONTECITOVALLEY.COM | 805.695.2533 | DRE# 02021945 Compass is a real estate broker licensed by the State of California and abides by Equal Housing Opportunity laws. License Number 01991628. All material presented herein is intended for informational purposes only and is compiled from sources deemed reliable but has not been verified. Changes in price, condition, sale or withdrawal may be made without notice.

No statement is made as to accuracy of any description. All measurements and square footage are approximate. If your property is currently listed for sale this is not a solicitation.

Santa Barbara’s Premier Shopping & Dining Destination

Step into the European allure of La Arcada Plaza. Venture beyond the ordinary, into a landscape of unique boutiques and culinary delights.

It ’s not just a place, it ’s an experience.

SHOPPING DINING

Ace Rivington | Catherine Gee | Coast 2 Coast Collections | Field Trip | Lewis & Clark | Renaissance Fine Consignment

Andersen’s Bakery & Restaurant | Barbieri & Kempe Wines | Hook and Press | Mizza | Petit Valentien | Pizza Mizza | State & Fig

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La Tavola Fine Linens | Lucky Puppy | Salon U | The Barber Shop | The Crafter’s Library | Urban Optics GALLERIES

Gallery 113 | The Yes Store | Waterhouse Gallery

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Moorpark 14349 White Sage Rd. 805.222.1380

www.wdcappliances.com

Oxnard 887 Ventura Blvd.

805.278.0388

Santa Barbara 3920 State St. 805.898.9883

Retail Repertoire A

nd so we come to the end of another year. Our Earth – topaz blue against its black-velvet backdrop – makes its 365¼ days journey around the neighborhood star, and we take the occasion to decorate, speak love to one another, and exchange gifts. In roughly that order. Here we’ve gathered a friendly selection of artisans and tastemakers – alphabetically arranged for your reference – that speak for themselves. Remember always: Love is all that matters. Oh, and a poorly considered gift can be a wrecking ball. Choose wisely.

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Retail Repertoire

Treasured Jewelry and Timepieces from Bryant & Sons

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or nearly 60 years, Bryant & Sons has offered fine jewelry and timepieces from distinguished designers like Cartier and Mikimoto. Founded by Bob Bryant in 1965, the store remains in its original El Paseo location. Graduate gemologists assist with custom creations, appraisals, and repairs in their onsite workshop. First-time buyers and collectors will find timeless, highest-quality pieces to treasure for generations. Their skilled team helps you select the perfect addition to your collection.

bryantandsons.com 805-966-9187 812 State Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93101 WINTER

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Retail Repertoire

Contemporary Art in Montecito at Caldwell Snyder Gallery

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aldwell Snyder has opened a contemporary art gallery on Montecito’s Coast Village Road, across from Lucky’s and Honor Bar. A 12-foot steel sculpture by acclaimed artist Brad Howe punctuates the entrance, creating a new local landmark.

Since 1983, Caldwell and Snyder have curated diverse exhibitions and inspired collections by more than 50 internationally renowned artists. With 500+ shows globally, Caldwell Snyder Gallery now establishes a permanent presence in Montecito and Southern California. Discover their meticulously curated selection of compelling contemporary art.

www.caldwellsnyder.com 805-770-7170 1266 Coast Village Road, Montecito, CA 93108

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Retail Repertoire

Feminine, Flirty, Classic at Catherine Gee

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xperience designer Catherine Gee’s sensual, feminine collections at her La Arcada boutique in downtown Santa Barbara. Originally known for silk shirts and slip dresses, she now creates effortless yet elevated pieces in luxurious fabrics. Her classic, flirty style is embraced by Hollywood stars and everyday women alike. Mixing flattering silhouettes with chic accessories, her timeless fashions are designed to make women feel confident and beautiful. Catherine Gee is the destination for investment pieces that are feminine, versatile, and reflect personal style.

catherinegee.com 805-324-4699 1114 State Street, Suite 24, Santa Barbara, CA 93101 Model > (photo by Hagop Kalaidjian) Sign > (image by Erick Madrid)

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Retail Repertoire

Timeless Jewelry Creations

by Daniel Gibbings

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aniel Gibbings handcrafts distinctive jewelry that embodies refined elegance and his own gentle, rustic style. Incorporating antiquities and ancient coins in production methods dating back to Byzantium, each exotic piece features chiseled gold, vivid gems, and old-world relics. Meticulous attention to detail creates one-of-a-kind designs with rich textures. Every creation is classically inspired yet uniquely his own. Gibbings’ impeccable eye for detail honors the past while establishing a new, distinctive niche.

www.danielgibbings.com 805-565-1284 1143 Coast Village Road, Montecito CA 93108 (photo by Blue Gabor | Model: Maika Monroe)

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Retail Repertoire

Artful Style from DIANI . DIANI Shoes . DIANI Living

“F

or as long as I can remember, my passion has been exploring the why behind that feeling you get when you’re surrounded by things that move you and make your soul sing. I find so much joy in bringing to life this idea through clothing, home decor and more at my stores. It’s the three pillars of my company: inspiration, community, experience. We are all inspired by art and design, we share the desire to feel connected, and the DIANI experience offers that, whether shopping in the boutiques in Santa Barbara or on our website.”

– Owner Caroline Diani www.dianiboutique.com 1-877-342-6474 1324 State Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93101

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Retail Repertoire

Relaxed Style from Esbee

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sbee produces locally designed, high-quality garments in well-fitted styles that reflect the relaxed Santa Barbara lifestyle. Founded in Montecito and detail-obsessed, their creations are statements of enduring style and authenticity.

With an unwavering commitment to quality, Esbee designs and produces all goods in the USA, embracing true craftsmanship. More than just clothing, their everyday essentials define elegance and comfort. Esbee offers an effortless style you can wear anywhere, made to last beyond passing trends. esbee.us Based in Montecito, CA

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Retail Repertoire

Elevated Essentials at Field + Fort

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ntroduced by designer Kyle Irwin and partner Susie Bechtel, Field + Fort offers elevated living essentials in Summerland.

Brimming with antiques, furniture, and home goods from bedding to kitchenware, Field + Fort also stocks gourmet pantry items. From one-of-a-kind vintage finds to reputable brands such as Staub, the collection is expertly curated for distinctive style. Enjoy a coffee while exploring their mix of global artifacts, modern decor, and artisanal provisions. Field + Fort helps create inspired, uplifted homes through thoughtful curation and quality staples.

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www.fieldandfort.com 805-770-7897 2580 Lillie Avenue, Summerland, CA 93067

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Retail Repertoire

Purpose-Driven Luxury from Grace de Monaco

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race de Monaco intertwines luxury with philanthropy to support the legacy of Princess Grace of Monaco. As a firstof-its-kind brand, they offer unparalleled craftsmanship and the highest quality materials in beauty, home and accessories. With 100% of profits benefitting the Princess Grace Foundation and its support of emerging artists, each purchase makes a direct impact. Grace de Monaco’s products represent timeless style while honoring Princess Grace’s passion for nurturing creative talent.

Embrace luxury for good.

gdmonaco.com

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Retail Repertoire

Refined California Style at Heidi Merrick

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eidi Merrick’s collection is known for wearable, timeless silhouettes and tailored essentials. Recognized for clean lines, understated elegance, and meticulous details, it represents refined yet approachable California style. Feel the fabrics and try the newest pieces first-hand in the intimate Summerland showroom. With simplified shapes, natural fibers, and nuanced color palettes, Heidi Merrick offers effortless polish for everyday. Discover the beauty of thoughtful design through her meticulously crafted collection.

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heidimerrick.com 2272 Lillie Avenue, Summerland, CA 93067 Editorial> (photo by Elizabeth Lippman)

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Photographer: TC Reiner; Model: Tiana Molony; Hair/Makeup: Melinda Miller-Rider

Handmade Luxury at Homer

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eiman Marcus, Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani, Coach, Tommy Bahama — once the kid from Arkansas got his foot in the fashion brand door he took off like a bespoke rocket. Terry Pillow knew what he wanted. Soon enough, so did the world at large. Now the inimitable (and happily detail-driven) Terry is throwing himself at his own flagship. Homer Montecito trades in functional, handmade leather objets d’art deeply radiant with craft – and a seduction

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of the senses. Stitchwork you want to run your hands over, the immersive old-world bouquet of dusky oak bark, and a space redolent of “cozy lamplit grotto,” Homer Montecito is equal parts sensory daydream and storefront. Inherent in the space’s name is the loving imprint of Terry’s father, grandfather, and child. These immersive leather goods will likewise travel down through, and interweave, family generations. @homermaker (206) 245-9076 1129 Coast Village Road, Montecito, California

2023

Retail Repertoire

Full-Service Design and Retail Shop from House of Rio

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ouse of Rio Design offers concierge design services from initial concept through builder coordination.

With a focus on high-end residential projects, House of Rio tailors your space to your unique aesthetic while keeping a keen eye on function and ease of living. Offering two brick and mortar shops, including the newest on State Street, House of Rio carries custom furniture, apparel, and one-of-kind housewares to accent your home.

Stop by and say hi! www.houseofrio.com @houseofriodesign 805.770.0000 1719 State Street, Santa Barbara 93101 2176 East Main Street Unit 101, Ventura, CA 93001

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Retail Repertoire

Athleisure Meets High Fashion at (IN)LARKIN®

(IN)

LARKIN®, founded by visionary Mary Beth Larkin, seamlessly fuses comfort, style, and versatility. With a background designing for Giorgio Armani, Larkin introduces athglamour®, merging athleisure and high-fashion influences. Her Style Stacks™ system simplifies building a wardrobe. The Santa Ynez flagship store, opened in 2022, and new Westlake Village location showcase her collections defining everyday casual glamour. Renowned for one-of-a-kind outfits with ease and edge, (IN)LARKIN® is the ultimate destination for fashionistas seeking a tailored, unique wardrobe. www.inlarkin.com 1-833-INLARKN 3568 Sagunto Street, Suite D, Santa Ynez, CA 140 Promenade Way, Suite C, Westlake Village, CA

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Retail Repertoire

Authentic Italian Ceramics at Italian Pottery Outlet

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amily owned for 40+ years, Italian Pottery Outlet offers the West Coast’s largest selection of quality, handmade Italian ceramics and volcanic stone tables. As a wholesale distributor buying in volume, they provide 30% off regular retail pricing. Since moving to State Street in 2008, they’ve expanded to offer artisanal gifts from around the world like glassware, linens, books, and candles. Discover beautiful, authentic Italian pottery imported directly for cooking, serving, and decorating. Their knowledgeable staff helps you find the perfect piece for your home.

www.italianpottery.com 805-564-7655 929 State Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93101 (photos by Zoe Nicole)

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Uplifting, Ethical Jewelry from Jes MaHarry

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es MaHarry infuses each handmade jewelry piece with positive energy and intention. Using only ethically sourced materials, her Ojai-based brand promotes courage, joy, and compassion. Many designs feature feel-good messages and symbols of nature and animals. MaHarry lives by her commitment to environmental stewardship and animal advocacy. After 30+ years in the industry, she has relaunched with a new creative direction – updated website and a flagship store to share her Ojai dreams. MaHarry designs uplift the spirit as much as adorn the body.

jesmaharry.com 805-798-9134 316 East Ojai Avenue, Ojai, CA 93023 (photos by Mariana Schulze)

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Gem by the Sea : Juniper Boutique

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uniper is a fashion boutique situated in beautiful Summerland, close to the ocean. It offers a blend of West Coast, East Coast, and European eclectic styles. Owner Marie Ferris has been designing handbags, clothes, and shoes for over 20 years. She has always believed that style is a way to express who you are in life and to distinguish yourself from others. Marie prefers to style her clients in a manner that allows them to wear the clothing, rather than letting the clothing wear them.

@Juniper__Montecito 2476 Lillie Avenue, Summerland CA 93067

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Shopping in Historic La Arcada Plaza

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n Downtown Santa Barbara’s Arts District, discover La Arcada Plaza, a charming historic complex with an international flair.

Wander the flower-filled plaza featuring interactive sculptures and the famous Turtle Fountain. With wonderful photo ops throughout, La Arcada offers a curated mix of locally owned boutiques, brand flagships, galleries, a wine tasting room, and restaurants with indoor/outdoor dining. Shop, dine, and celebrate community in these beautiful historic buildings. La Arcada Plaza is the premier destination for a relaxing day of shopping, dining, and exploration in the heart of the city.

LaArcadaSantaBarbara.com La Arcada Plaza 1114 State Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93101

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Timeless Glamour from Laykin et Cie

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ynonymous with Hollywood glamour since 1932, Laykin et Cie creates bespoke precious jewels at their L.A. and Paris ateliers. Their vintage estate pieces curated from the firm’s Art Deco, Hollywood Regency, and Mid-Century heritage mix with custom designs. Fourth-generation jeweler Erik Laykin revived the company in 2016, bringing back their brilliance. With boutiques at the Rosewood Miramar in Montecito and locations in L.A. and San Marino, Laykin et Cie gems exude the jeweled splendor that has defined their aesthetic for more than 90 years.

These singular jewels evoke enduring sophistication.

Laykin.com 805-900-1010 at The Rosewood Miramar Beach Resort, 1759 South Jameson Lane, Montecito, CA 93108 866-529-5467 633 West 5th Street, 26th Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90071 626-399-0507 2479 Mission Street, San Marino, CA 91108

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Indulgent Finery at Lily Boutique

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ily, on Coast Village Road in Montecito, is an enchanting boutique originally created by Linda O’Hare. Her impeccable taste established Lily as a true local gem. Now owned by Lissa Liggett, who carries on the vision while adding her own unique touches, Lily infuses the space with a fresh, captivating energy. Visitors are greeted by the exquisite scents of handcrafted perfumes, soaps, and candles. From indulgent bath products to apparel and gifts, Lily offers a transportive shopping experience. Discover the boutique’s new era of relaxed yet refined luxury.

www.lilyinmontecito.com 805-695-0625 1131 Coast Village Road, Montecito, CA 93108 (photos by Kim Reierson)

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Global Finds at MAISON K

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AISON K is a treasure trove of fine women’s clothing and accessories sourced worldwide. Owner Kimberly Hayes draws on her decades of experience to hand-select collections from Paris, Milan, Marrakech, and beyond. She works with small businesses to create unique private label collections. While predominantly fashion-focused, MAISON K also carries ceramics by Astier de Villatte and textiles from Uzbekistan. The boutique expertly showcases Hayes’ passion for fashion, design, and artistic traditions from across the globe.

Discover MAISON K’s curated selection of inspired international style. maisonkstyle.com | @maisonkstyle 805-969-1676 1253 Coast Village Road, Montecito, CA 93108

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All Under One Roof at Mattress Mike’s Furniture Gallery

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fter 29 years, family-owned Mattress Mike has expanded into a sprawling 70,000-square-foot Furniture Gallery in the former Sears building. Featuring top brands like Stressless, American Leather, Aireloom mattresses, and the exclusive La-Z-Boy gallery, they bring quality home furnishings closer to home. Their alignment with Moving Miss Daisy’s consignment store creates a unique shopping experience. This new era marks the Central Coast’s largest onestop destination for fine furniture under one roof. Mattress Mike welcomes you to Santa Barbara’s premier Furniture Gallery for all your home furnishing needs.

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www.mattressmikesb.com 805-685-4998 3845 State Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93105

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Elevated Style at Montecito Collective

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ontecito Collective offers a curated collection of elevated everyday basics, from casual wear to evening wear.

Their commitment to a personalized shopping experience tailored to individual tastes sets them apart. By collaborating with renowned and emerging designers, they provide access to unique, high-quality pieces. Discover timeless style and make a new friend at Montecito Collective. Their goal is to help you create a wardrobe that reflects your personal style.

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shopmontecitocollective.com 805-705-5649 1250 Coast Village Road #G, Montecito, CA 93108

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Designer Eyewear at OCCHIALI

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or more than 35 years, OCCHIALI has combined fashion awareness with prescriptive expertise. They offer an unrivaled selection of couture eyewear from Europe, Japan, and America. OCCHIALI strives to provide a premier client experience. Their top opticians excel at guiding the perfect pair selection. Find couture eyewear that is equal parts glamorous, innovative, and tailored to your needs. With an extensive collection of today’s most coveted designers, OCCHIALI helps you see clearly while staying on trend.

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www.occhialieyewear.com 805-565-3415 1046 Coast Village Road, Montecito, CA 93108

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Iconic Resortwear from Orlebar Brown

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ince 2007, British brand Orlebar Brown has reinvented holiday style for men with their signature swim shorts one can swim in. Instantly recognizable by their side fasteners, the classic Bulldog style comes with a five-year guarantee, showcasing their commitment to quality. Orlebar Brown creates timeless, tailored menswear that enables customers to holiday better. Now part of Chanel, the global lifestyle brand has 40+ boutiques worldwide, including a new location coming soon to Montecito. Orlebar Brown’s hallmark swimwear and resort essentials define sophisticated, stylish travel. www.orlebarbrown.com 844-820-0491 Opening Soon in Montecito, CA

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Custom Window Coverings and Furnishings by Pampel Design

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n 2017, Pampel Design was established by a couple who are both life and business partners. After relocating from Alabama to California, they leveraged their extensive experience—spanning over 20 years in the window covering industry—to proudly open a showroom on State Street in 2018. This showroom has since become a beacon for those seeking interior window coverings, exterior shade solutions, upholstery, and both indoor and outdoor furniture. By 2020, their commitment to craftsmanship saw the inauguration of a 6,000 sq. ft. sewing room in Goleta. Here, they engage in local in-house fabrication, creating custom shades, awnings, canopies, cushions, and more. Pampel Design is not just about products; they are about shaping indoor and outdoor spaces that significantly uplift their clients’ experiences. They feature products from esteemed vendors such as KE Outdoor, Lutron, Fabritec, Conrad, and many more. www.pampeldesign.com 805-881-8041 1014 State Street, Unit B, Santa Barbara, CA 93101

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Vintage Treasures at Peregrine Galleries

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or 40 years, Peregrine has been the destination for rare vintage jewelry and contemporary art in Montecito.

Owner Marlene specializes in sought-after categories like vintage Chanel, Hermès, Bakelite, and Native American designs. She also carries pieces by noted contemporary designers. The gallery is known for carrying early California art and featuring Karen de la Peña exclusively. With a carefully curated collection of jewelry, art, and objects, Peregrine is a trove of unique discoveries and vintage treasures.

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@peregrinegalleries (805) 252-9659 1133 Coast Village Road, Santa Barbara, CA 93108

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California Inspired Fine Art at Portico Gallery

(“Icon of the West” by Dennis Newell)

(“Cool Breeze” 48x36 by Jordan Pope)

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ortico Fine Art, the longest established gallery on Montecito’s Coast Village Road, is a destination for art lovers worldwide. Featuring notable California and national artists, they specialize in contemporary landscape, still life, equestrian, figurative, and western genres. Portico represents John Budicin, Jordan Pope, Dennis Newell, and other acclaimed artists with new acquisitions weekly. Artists paint en plein air in the courtyard for special events. The gallery also offers

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painting classes in the Monet Room, a private studio located behind the gallery. Portico Fine Art thoughtfully curates fine art that captures the essence of the California spirit through the vision of exceptional artists. porticofinearts.com 805-729-8454 1235 Coast Village Road, Suite B, Montecito, CA 93108

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Handcrafted Eyewear from SALT. Optics

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ALT. Optics offers premium Japanese eyewear with best-inclass hardware and polarized lenses. Located at The Shops at Sportsmen’s Lodge (Studio City, California), their professional opticians help find the perfect fit and can fill prescriptions.

Custom options create a bespoke experience. SALT. features handcrafted frames made with top-quality materials designed to last. With an array of styles and lens options, they have the perfect pair to fit both your vision needs and personal style. saltoptics.com (photos by Steven Clouse)

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Handcrafted Jewelry from Silverhorn Design Studio

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or more than four decades, the internationally recognized Silverhorn has been hand-crafting exquisite pieces of jewelry from the finest materials and with enduring quality. Seeking out rare and unique gemstones, Silverhorn’s designers win awards for creativity and craftsmanship year after year. Each piece, created with a specific gemstone in mind, is meticulously crafted using artisan methods and exacting precision. Clients can visit the Design Studio and observe the artisans at work, surrounded by a gallery exhibiting fine jewelry. There, one can select a finished piece or commission a custom design for a truly one-of-a-kind statement piece.

www.silverhorn.com 805-969-0442 1235 Coast Village Road, Montecito CA 93108

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American Art Leaders at Sullivan Goss Gallery

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stablished in 1984, Sullivan Goss Gallery is the largest between Los Angeles and San Francisco. For nearly 40 years, they have represented the work of American artists with approximately 20 exhibitions annually, including solo shows, thematic exhibitions, and more. As specialists in important historic, modern, and contemporary American art, Sullivan Goss helps collectors build significant collections.

With a vast inventory and rotating exhibitions, Sullivan Goss Gallery remains dedicated to showcasing the breadth of creativity expressed through American art across eras.

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www.sullivangoss.com 805-730-1460 11 East Anapamu Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93101

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Artistic Textiles at The Fabric Merchant

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rene Salas finds art and passion in textiles from around the world. Surrounding herself with handmade throws, antique linens, and eco-dyed fabrics connects her to nature and humanity’s creative spirit. She collaborates with artisans globally to continue textile traditions using natural materials and processes. Salas honors the loving hands that harvest, weave, embroider, and dye each piece. Her collection of soft home furnishings and women’s ready to wear clothing by Sainte Marie are created to be lived in and cherished. Irene shares her textile discoveries, so others experience the joy of art through fabric. @thefabricmerchantco 805-325-5761 2920 B Grand Avenue, Los Olivos, CA 93441 (photos by Kim Reierson)

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Globally Curated Style at True Love Always

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rue Love Always offers an eclectic, stylish mix of globally sourced must-haves for home and wardrobe. Inspiration from owner Lori’s travels plus daughter Olivia’s editorial eye make it an unparalleled destination for the new and next. Their highly curated lifestyle boutique features beautiful, interesting finds to add intrigue to your lifestyle. With an eye for unique pieces from around the world, they help you curate a collection that reflects your distinct style. www.tlagoods.com 805-679-5456 1115 Coast Village Road, Montecito, CA 93108 (photos by Meg Sandu)

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Masterworks in Traditional Contemporary Art at Waterhouse Gallery

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or 39 years, Waterhouse Gallery has presented excellence in traditional contemporary art emphasizing landscapes, figures, and cityscapes by today’s leading masters. Founded in 1984 by Ralph and Diane Waterhouse, they strive to showcase the highest standard of quality across diverse subject matter.

Outstanding nationally acclaimed painters highlight the California coast’s beauty and Santa Barbara’s unique allure. With two locations in Montecito and Downtown Santa Barbara, Waterhouse Gallery celebrates the wonder of place through the visionary works of contemporary impressionists and plein air painters.

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www.waterhousegallery.com 805-886-2988 1187 Coast Village Road 3b, Montecito, CA 93108 805-452-1062 La Arcada, 1114 State Street #9, Santa Barbara, CA 93101

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Artful Adornments at ZFolio Galleries

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Folio curates artful jewelry, art glass, and photography that express beauty as a way of life. Founded in Solvang in 2006 with a sister gallery in Monterey, their collections uplift the spirit. Specializing in unique, not ordinary designs,

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often European, ZFolio is a trusted guide to the nonmainstream. They reduce too many choices with a focused, thoughtful selection. Their goal is to inspire self-expression and never stop dreaming. At ZFolio, life is short – beauty makes it worth living. They help clients celebrate dreams and milestones with meaning.

Zfolio.com 805-693-8480 1685 Copenhagen Drive, Solvang, CA 93463

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GRUBB CAMPBELL GROUP Knowledge. Strength. Results.

We have a genuine passion for our work in real estate. Our expertise in selling houses, investment properties, and residential income properties is a valuable asset to our clients. Working directly with the owner of Village Properties and being part of the largest locally owned and operated brokerage provides us with a unique advantage, enabling us to offer creative and flexible solutions tailored to our clients’ needs. Our appreciation for Santa Barbara’s beauty and our gratitude for living and working in such a wonderful place further underscores our commitment to our community and our profession. This dedication to our work and our clients sets us apart in the real estate industry. Give us five minutes of your time so we can share how we work!

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805-895-6226 | grubbcampbell@villagesite.com grubbcampbell.com | DRE 01236143/01410304 All information provided is deemed reliable, but has not been verified and we do not guarantee it. We recommend that buyers make their own inquiries. Village Properties is an exclusive member of Forbes Global Properties. Forbes®️ is a registered trademark used under license.

2476 Lillie Ave., Summerland, CA 93067 Juniper_Montecito Instagram

805.869.2945

Steve Postell: axe man extraordinaire and object lesson in dreaming big.

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The Possible Dream Guitarist Steve Postell Wanted It All. Is That Asking So Much?

By Jeff Wing

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uring a break in rehearsal, Steve Postell spots a guitarist pal named Brian Ray in the studio dining commons and heads over to join him. As he draws closer, Postell’s blood begins to curl (my words). Seated next to Ray is a guy – his back to Postell – whose omnipresence in 20th-century post-war Western Civ makes him identifiable from any angle.

Postell is a musician familiar with celebrity. He has been trucking with the Legendary Plectrum set for much of his professional career and has long since swapped stunned reverence for friendship and chops-trading with some of the most revered musicians in the business. Some months before, he’d wrangled a constellation of music industry cognoscenti to pay public tribute to his friend and recent rock n’ roll decedent David Crosby – he of The Byrds, CSNY, and a canon of generation-defining songs that will haunt our collective turntable until Earth plows into the sun.

But this time is different – the gentleman in the lunchroom is a living benediction whose example has catalyzed Postell’s lifelong artistic narrative. What does one say to a totem? Postell had taken a crack at it earlier in the day, while jamming at the highfalutin rehearsal hangar in Burbank called Center Staging. The gentleman had sauntered in while Postell and [Abbey Road and Let it Be engineer] Alan Parsons were working through a number in prep for the ONE805 First Responder charity event soon to unfold at Kevin Costner’s central coast pad – an altruistic musical supernova for which Postell has assembled the wildly star-packed house band. Now stunned by the mythic mop-top’s sudden appearance, Postell yet managed a blithe remark. “I said, ‘Oh, are you here to rehearse with us?’ And he says, ‘Well, no. But if it’s any help, I do know the tune ‘Hey Jude.’”

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Steve Postell

(clockwise from left) Reason to fret: Postell at home – onstage and bathed in colored light. Sealed away behind studio glass Postell and legendary bassist/Immediate Family brother Leland Sklar.

Sex, Drugs, and Andrés Segovia

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teve Postell is a key figure in the rock n’ roll guitar firmament. He achieved his station the hard way – and I don’t mean by chewing the head off a live bat in front of label execs. Neither is Postell the guy hurling a TV set out the hotel room window; a beloved rock ceremony anyway obsoleted by today’s unwieldy flat screen with its drunkard-stymying width. Classically trained, soft-spoken, earnest, Postell doesn’t present like someone who has spent a lifetime axe-handling with the greats.

Admittedly, the Roy Rogers/Yngwie Malmsteen continuum makes a hash of that remark.

A guitarist’s guitarist, Postell has long been a known quantity to music biz insiders. He has accompanied, and in some cases written with, such era-defining troubadours as David Crosby, Neil Young, John Oates, Robben Ford, Dave Koz, Eric Johnson, Richard Thompson, and Jackson Browne. That’s a sampling.

Fifteen or so years ago at this writing, Postell signed on with a regal gang who call themselves The Immediate Family – a band of longtime session maestros who appear like the Good Housekeeping Seal on some of the more storied albums of the past 50 years. Celebrated WINTER

documentarian Denny Tedesco’s film on the group – due to begin streaming on December 15 – has already gathered a bevy of awards from the film-festival circuit.

Postell’s calling announced itself around the time his baby teeth began wiggling out of their sockets. “My mother and I were walking through Central Park, and there was a guy, a busker playing his guitar. I was completely transfixed for whatever reason. I just … I wouldn’t leave.” His parents’ response was to drag the preschooler to a concert of Spanish guitar virtuoso Andrés Segovia. “Then a year later, The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, which they had me watch,” Postell says. “So it begins with an influx of art that was ever-present in my life.” Postell’s wild ride has had more elements, anecdotes, and kaleidoscopic happenstance than this magazine piece can reasonably convey, given the brutal constraints placed on the writer by his frightening overlords. But here’s a summary of our hero’s arc.

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Steve Postell

“...my father was an unknown conspirator...” Steve and his physician/spokesperson dad.

Long-haired teen working on harmless, world-conquering hobby.

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“Give your son this record.”

o use the sociologist’s jargon, Postell grew from kid to older kid.

All the while, his artist mom and physician dad intentionally contributed what they could to the young creative’s ineffable admixture. Postell got his first taste of melomania from his mom, for instance. Much later, the color left his face. “I only thought to ask about it six or so years ago – how did my mother end up with this phenomenal record collection?! It had everything – Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, there was Broadway show music, there was the Great Folk anthology, there was all the classical music and Coltrane. So, I asked her. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just liked music!’”

On the paternal side, evidence emerged that Postell’s physician dad must be gabbing about his kid to captive customers. Imagine the good doctor immobilizing his client with an over-insistent tongue depressor while holding forth on his musically gifted son. How else to explain this? “One day a patient of my dad’s said, ‘Here, give your son this record,’ and gave my father Meet the Beatles. And then he came home with The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and then he came home with Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane. So, my father was an unknown conspirator in this plan.” At a comparatively tender age, the young man was clearly doomed to a life bereft of brown wingtips and business lunches. “They finally got me a guitar when I was eight,” Postell says.

“I still have it in the other room. It’s a Goya classical.” Pause. “It still has the little rubber duck that I shoved inside it.”

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Interior Design Styled for Your Life

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Steve Postell

Glower Power: Postell in early throes of “facial rock chops.” Score! That time Steve Postell and Samuel L. Jackson shared a poster.

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Dylan in the Bowels of Carnegie Hall: A Warning

ostell’s rise to musical eminence was on track and bore the linear inevitability of a flung strand of spaghetti. “I think there’s a lot of luck in these trajectories,” the guitarist masterfully understates. There is indeed a certain madness in the array of accelerants that launched the guy. Happenstance, kismet, and providence are known to swarm like summer gnats around the gifted seeker. Don’t quote me. His creative competencies having spread like a field of compost-maddened weeds, by 16 Postell knew exactly what he wanted. Unfortunately, it was everything. “I thought I was going to be a painter, photographer, writer, and musician,” Postell says. The need to focus on and harness his creative future was evident, and the teenager spent some time in the figurative Himalayas seeking his own path to the summit. As can happen when one is scaling a sacred mountain in the mind’s Nepal, he bumped into Bob Dylan.

“An amazing teacher named Norman Raeben had a little painting studio in Carnegie Hall, and I took a class from him when I was 16. Back then, all the floors were filled with music studios and painting studios and singing teachers. It was a small class and Bob Dylan was in it. He was coming off that bad motorcycle accident in upstate New York.” Dylan’s deeply mythologized ’66 wipeout had coincided with his exhausting “Voice of a Generation” zenith – zonked pilgrims showing up at his home in Woodstock at all hours and scaring the bejesus out of Bob. “My impression was that he was a really lost guy at that point,” Postell says. “But it also occurred to me – Dylan can have a setback and take two years learning to paint while he figures out a next move. But what if I go through something … and I’m not Bob Dylan?” Postell’s interesting rhetorical concern – that he might go through something and not be Bob Dylan – summarized a crucial epiphany; what he wanted was to be an Artist with Security – an oxymoron on a par with Original Copy and Jumbo Shrimp. “I decided to go to music school and actually make my musicianship a craft.” The alternative was too ghastly to contemplate. “My main focus was, I’d be terrible at a job. I would just be terrible at it! Maybe I’d be a good bank robber, but a regular job? No.” Postell’s full panicked flight from the 9 to 5 really got things rolling.

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“I got the guy for you.” Postell in minstrel garb for Broadway’s Man of La Mancha.

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The Possible Dream and Doing the Polymath

ostell enrolled at Mannes School of Music (since 2015 a part of the New School in Manhattan) and began punctilious training in classical guitar. To leaven the Bach-ache, he augmented his classical stuff with private lessons of another flavor, his teacher a brilliant and laconic instructor named Myron Weiss. “He’d been a Broadway player in the pit for Cats for 14 years. I dove into theory and scales, but in more of a contemporary jazz context.”

Reader: When a telephone was the size of a shoebox and bolted to the wall, you had to take an incoming call just to stop the damned thing ringing. One afternoon, the phone rang in the middle of Postell’s private lesson. Instructor Weiss apologized with a raised forefinger – “Sorry, Steve. One second” – and took the call. After some chit-chat, Weiss said to the caller, “Ok, hold on,” and placed his hand over the receiver. “Steve, you want to go on tour with Man of La Mancha?” “I guess so,” Postell said absently. “Great. You’d be perfect for it.” Weiss got back on the line. “I got the guy for you.”

Postell being Postell – a rocket with a four-leaf clover as guidance system – the Man of La Mancha gig dropped him into the middle of an indescribably fruitful network. “I got to know conductors, which led to me co-writing a couple of off-Broadway shows. I met dancers, and I started writing some stuff for dance. And some of the conductors wrote commercials, and I started writing jingles. I was a professional musician overnight.” One with an increasingly varied portfolio. Think Artist with Security.

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“Rocky Mountains, hi.” A Formative Aspen Detour.

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ostell’s work playing guitar on Broadway – and writing off-Broadway productions – lasted for some seven years, during which time he increasingly gigged in the clubs and grottoes of NYC, his already preternatural chops growing by leaps and bounds. “I wasn’t on the road much, and I was playing in the city at night. My band got signed

by Sid Bernstein during that period.” Bernstein is the contract-waving impresario who brought The Beatles, Rolling Stones, the Moody Blues, and The Kinks to America in the ‘60s; think “Benedict Arnold of the British Invasion.” At the same time, NYC’s clubland seemed to be winding down as a spark-throwing center of the universe. Postell began to eye L.A. Naturally, a door opened.

“I got a gig around ‘88 to produce a four-song EP for this incredible singer who’d done a show with me called Shakespeare’s Cabaret at the Bijou Theatre.

I sang a duet with her every night. She wanted me to produce, but she needed to do it in L.A.” Postell’s first trip to Los Angeles as a working producer/ musician was a shoestring affair – if the shoe is a Louis Vuitton Manhattan Richelieu. “We got a big suite up on Hollywood Boulevard, a rented sports car, and an amazing studio. I was trying to figure out how she was paying for all this.” One day she pulled Postell aside. “She goes, ‘Bob Dylan’s paying for this, and I’m his wife’” – likely the nine words Postell least expected to hear that day [see: Carolyn Dennis]. In the meantime, L.A. rolled out her finery. “The Strip was insane. And that’s when I met my very close friend [singer-songwriter and recording artist] Dan Navarro. He was like, ‘Hey, my cousin has this band and they’re about to get signed. We should go see.’ It was Jane’s Addiction.”

Back in New York, Postell took in a Lonnie Mack show at the Lone Star Café and had his doors blown off. “To be that amazing, you have to play all the time. So, that’s when I went to Aspen.” Okay. Postell stumbled into Aspen at the behest of a guitarplaying, top-seeded tennis star who’d asked him to assemble a band. “He sort of fancied himself a rock and roller,” Postell says amiably. “You know, long hair and some attitude. All the celebrities loved him.

He said, ‘Hey, I want to put a band together and go to Aspen and play New Year’s Eve.’ But he had one musician: a bass player.”

Unceremoniously quitting NYC (“…the idea of going back to a little box in a cement city – I

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When not touring, Postell’s Aspen band – Little Blue – backed iconic artists/future friends.

was done with it”), Postell planned to spend a couple weeks in the bejeweled Colorado village and move on, but his “Aspen Period” became a game-changing, 10-year sojourn during which he would meet, play alongside, and write with some of the music industry’s biggest artists. His band backed John Oates, Grammy-familiar songstress Jennifer Warnes asked Postell to be her musical director on her first tour in 11 years – and there was so much more. Aspen was a future-defining cornucopia. There was a downside.

“We’d play with Glenn Frey and David Crosby and all these people. But I could tell that they thought of me as a really good guy who plays in Aspen.” He had to get to Los Angeles. A Drumming legend and friend helped. “Steve Ferrone [Average White Band, Tom Petty, Mick Jagger, Bee Gees, Pat Metheny, Eric Clapton, et al] made it pretty easy for me. ‘Come to L.A. and you’ll be part of a studio.’” Making the jump, Postell’s association with Ferrone gave him an immediate L.A. reputation by proxy.

Then everyone heard what Postell could do with a guitar and truly brought him in. Steve was home.

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Steve Postell

Joined at the Postell – Crosby, Browne, and Loggins were early lights for Steve, and later friends (Black & white photos by Alan Kozlowski)

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Steve Postell

Classic record collection made flesh. Left to right: Russ Kunkel, Leland Sklar, Steve, Danny Kortchmar, Waddy Wachtel – The Immediate Family.

Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines – An Immediate Family

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ostell had long venerated members of a band called The Section – an early ’70s fusion band whose members, in a mellower vibe, would be omnipresent on the singer-songwriter era’s most legendary recordings. Leland Sklar, Waddy Wachtel, Russ Kunkel, and the inimitable Danny Kortchmar (of Taylor’s original band The Flying Machine, whose bittersweet mention appears in Taylor’s song “Fire and Rain”) are today renowned session giants emeriti, and Steve Postell’s bandmates in The Immediate Family.

Postell met Danny Kortchmar at L.A.’s Troubadour in 2009, the legendary club abuzz at that moment with the “Troubadour Reunion” world tour James Taylor and Carole King would soon be kicking off. When Postell and Danny later played an impromptu sit-down at a New Year’s Eve party, Postell was obliged to reveal his fanboy decoder ring. “Danny goes, ‘Wow, man! That was like we’ve been playing together forever!’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve been playing along with your records for about that long.’” When Kortchmar et al. were approached by an enthusiastic offshore label wanting to fund an album, Postell’s synergy within the nascent supergroup had long since been established. The Immediate Family was born. That was 6 years ago and the music press is still trembling with the news.

In the jarring present tense, Postell has inadvertently marched right into his idol’s personal space. In a lunchroom. The surreal moment unfolds as revelation. “I realized that in my life, there’s been John and Paul. In another realm, there is Hendrix – not as profoundly, but close – and there is Dylan, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, of course,” Postell says. What he wanted from day one was to possess the much-discussed, endlessly analyzed Lennon/McCartney yin and yang. “I wanted to be a poet and be able to write, and I wanted to be a rocker, and I wanted to be a great musician,” he says. “Paul is one of the greatest musicians of all time.”

Now, the mop-topped avatar who planted the fire in Postell – and in a generation of other kids for whom the electric guitar transfigured overnight into scepter, sword, and paintbrush – is close enough to touch. When Macca turns in his seat to aim his fab face at our hero, Postell gamely quips for the second time that day. “Huh! Are you in this band?” “Yeah,” says Sir Paul with a wry nod at his lunchmates. “I can’t get rid of these guys!” Then addressing the few gathered there, the Beatle warbles in his Liverpudlian singsong.

“Hey, I know you guys aren’t here tomorrow. I just wanted to say it was great to meet you all.” And in a fleeting instant, it’s over. Steve Postell, of all people – longtime friend and respected colleague to some of the most esteemed names in modern popular music – is overawed. “It was a beautiful moment,” he says quietly. Two beats. “But if I’d known it was him, I wouldn’t have walked over there.”

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WAY IT WAS

BY HATTIE BERESFORD

The Artists of the Hamilton Chessboard

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Landscape painter Thomas Van Stein and Ziggy Peake, grandson of artist Channing Peake, engaged in a game of chess on the Hamilton Chessboard at Van Stein’s studio.

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n autumn 2022, landscape painter Thomas Van Stein and Ziggy Peake, grandson of artist Channing Peake, engaged in a game of chess at Van Stein’s studio. The chessboard they used was no ordinary board, but the long-lost chessboard created for Channing Peake’s good friend and fellow artist Jack Hamilton. Van Stein had heard of its existence and, ever curious, had been searching for the board and the story behind its creation for more than a year.

The board had surfaced for a time in 1979, when Channing’s former wife Katie Peake, who was then in possession of the board, approached Woodie Press founder Thomas Moore with an idea for a project – a poster of the chessboard. After all, the board was the work of some incredible well-known artists. Both Ziggy and Roxanne Lapidus, daughter of artist Campbell Grant, who contributed drawings for the board, are still in possession of these posters. A key was created to identify the artists, though some remained unknown.

By 2021, the board had disappeared again, and Van Stein was on the hunt. When Channing’s son Michael tragically died in an automobile accident, Van Stein asked Michael’s son Ziggy to look for it among the items in Michael’s studio. And lo and behold, the sequestered board was found.

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WAY IT WAS

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pparently passed along like guests at a very long progressive dinner during the year of its creation, 1939, the unusual board features the work of some 18 artists. In August of that year, a News-Press reporter had visited the studio of local artist Dudley Carpenter where he said, “On the wall, we spied a chessboard that will be the envy and despair of fans. It’s really a Christmas present to Jack Hamilton (last Christmas, but one of those presents which don’t get done until the next). The dark squares are ornamented by the Carpenters and their artist friends.

“Three are still blank. One was supposed to contain a drawing by Joe de Yong, but after keeping it for a month or two, Joe, with all his work in films, decided he simply couldn’t find the time. Rico Lebrun kept it ages, too, but eventually drew a handsome knight standing on his head.

“We love Mrs. Vhay’s fat mermaid looking at herself in the mirror; Campbell Grant’s rhino with a ruffle round his waist and walking a tight rope; John Gamble’s giant cacti and a moon; Ted Carpenter’s fawn and skunk; Dudley’s jousting knights; and Blossom Hollister’s elephant roller skating. Only the thing is, we fail to see how Jack and his friends are ever going to keep their minds on chess.”

It must have been difficult indeed, for many of the unmentioned squares were ornamented with provocative images. An artistic chessboard was, of course, the perfect gift for Jack Hamilton, who held frequent chess evenings for his friends at his studio dubbed The Innerwick Chess and Chowder Club. Jack so valued this clubhouse that

(left to right) Seated Gordon Grant, Ted Carpenter, Carlina Sheridan, Jack Hamilton, and Polly Forsyth at a reading for a community play.

when he moved from his original home on East Valley Road, he moved the clubhouse to his new place at 616 Hot Springs Road.

Jack and his artist friends formed a tight-knit group that spanned generations. Some were already accomplished and wellrespected artists; others would become well-known in later days, and some would fade into obscurity, moving away from art as a profession. The Chessboard, therefore, represents a portion of Santa Barbara’s Art Colony during the years that followed the 1920s Golden Age of Santa Barbara Arts – the subsequent years of the Great Depression and World War II.

The Innerwick Chess and Chowder Club wooden score chart was created by Campbell Grant.

(Courtesy Roxanne Grant Lapidus)

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WAY IT WAS

Dudley Carpenter

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he granddaddy and mentor of the new crop of artists arriving in Santa Barbara at the beginning of the Depression was Dudley Carpenter. It was in Carpenter’s studio that the reporter discovered the unfinished Chessboard in 1939. It was Carpenter who accompanied Channing Peake on the first part of his trip to Mexico. It was Dudley’s son Theodore (“Ted”) who became Dudley Carpenter was granddad- fast friends with the younger dy and mentor to the younger members of the group. And it was artists arriving in Santa Barbara at Dudley who had early connecthe start of the Depression (Courtions to Louise Vhay, Malcolm tesy Dudley Carpenter) Thurburn, John Gamble, Robert Wilson Hyde, and Joe De Yong – all contributors to the chessboard.

Born in Tennessee in 1870, Carpenter arrived in Santa Barbara in 1920. At that time he was already an accomplished artist having studied in Paris and the Art Students League, and he had been exhibiting his work since the 1890s. Though he eventually gravitated toward portraiture, he was also a muralist and landscape painter. In Santa Barbara, he branched out by painting stage sets for the Community Arts Players and teaching at the School of the Arts. During the Depression, finding that commissions for his portraits were drying up, he turned to sculpture to create threedimensional portraits.

He was a founder of the Santa Barbara Art League in 1924, and, with the financial assistance of Mrs. Max Schott, Katie Peake’s mother, he reopened the defunct School of the Arts as the Alhecama Art Center in 1939.

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(top left) Dudley Carpenter created jousting knights, which was in keeping with the theme of chess. (above) Ted Carpenter’s contribution to the chessboard seems influenced by the Disney production of Bambi. (below) Carpenter’s images depicting stories from the life of St. Francis decorate the ceiling of the anteroom of the El Paseo Restaurant. (Courtesy Thomas Van Stein)

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WAY IT WAS

John (Jack) Borden Hamilton

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he recipient of the chessboard, Jack Hamilton, was born in Pelham, New York, in 1905. His mother, who was an heiress to the Borden Condensed Milk fortune, died shortly after Jack’s birth. Between 1922 and 1923, his father moved the family to Santa Barbara, and Jack’s older sister Dorothy, who had attended the Jack Hamilton. (Courtesy of Santa Barbara School for Girls, Roxanne Grant Lapidus) married Robert McKee Hyde.

“Bobby” is credited with developing the bohemian Mountain Drive Community and was a devotee of chess. He was the son of Robert Wilson Hyde, artist and illuminist, who became one of the chessboard artists.

Jack spent some time in Europe in the late 1920s and upon his return seemed to divide his time between Santa Barbara and New York. In Santa Barbara, he became fast friends with budding artists Channing Peake and Campbell Grant, who had enrolled in the Santa Barbara School of the Arts in 1929. That last year of the Roaring Twenties was also the first year of the Depression, though no one at the time thought it would last for more than a decade.

In October 1930, Jack and Campbell Grant drove east together. Campbell would work for his School of the Arts mentor, muralist Albert Herter, and Jack would continue his travels. Upon Jack’s return to New York in February 1931, he enrolled in the Art Students League and continued his studies in art.

In 1935, Jack was hospitalized in New York with polio.

When he returned to Santa Barbara in 1937, he and (top) Mary Forsyth Hamilton, aka Polly, drew a woman luxuriating in the bath (above) Jack’s shy naked angel is being spied upon by a cupid in the clouds.

Jack contributed a contemplative mermaid to the chessboard.

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Campbell’s brother Gordon Grant, also an artist, shared a studio at Meridian Studios on De La Guerra Street. At that time, Jack began participating in various exhibitions. For a Faulkner Gallery show of spring 1938, the organizers said, “We are happy to welcome Jack Hamilton into the local exhibition. There is historical interest in his ‘Church at Sisquoc,’ the little white frame church on a high mesa where the early Spanish worshiped (sic). It is well painted, also, and so is his ‘Round House’ painted in a dark key.” Jack’s foray into Santa Barbara’s world of art – albeit brief – had begun.

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(far left) Campbell’s whimsical hippo reveals his Disney training. (left) Campbell Grant’s foppish knave echoes Rico Lebrun’s self-portrait. (right) Gordon Grant drew a nubile young African woman in a Krishna-like pose.

Campbell Grant (left) and Channing Peake show off their catch on a local fishing expedition. (Courtesy Santa Barbara Historical Museum)

Campbell Grant

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ne of the central characters in the story of the chessboard is Campbell Grant. Jack and Campbell remained great friends for much of their lives. During their free-spirited, unfettered youthful days, they often went camping and fishing together in the Sierras and elsewhere. They were young and in love with life, and romances bloomed and faded among the group of friends in what Roxanne Grant Lapidus, Campbell’s daughter, said were “dizzying scenes from Shakespeare’s comedies.”

Campbell fell in love with Blossom Owen, who then fell for his brother Gordon, but Gordon threw her over for Carlina Sheridan. Campbell took up with Polly Forsyth who would later fall for and marry Jack, and Jack would be best man at Campbell’s wedding to Lou Tuckerman. The younger artists of the chessboard expressed these tantalizing, glorious days through the images they created for the chessboard.

After Campbell’s scholarship to the School of the Arts expired in 1931 and the Depression deepened, Campbell scrambled for commissions to keep a roof over his head. In 1933, the federal government initiated the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), which hired artists to create murals and other public art projects. Campbell was hired to create murals on “The History of the New World” for the foyer of Santa Barbara High School.

Years later, Campbell said that the Public Works Art Project had allowed people who had a great deal of talent to continue with their work. “If it wasn’t for this project,” he said in an interview with the Smithsonian in 1965, “there would have been an awful lot of fine artists practicing today who would have been forced into other fields.”

Campbell’s brother Gordon, too, received many commissions from State and Federal relief programs. He had already made a 196

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name for himself as a painter and muralist for his intricate, stylized Native American dancers. He had worked and studied under renowned muralist Albert Herter and was influenced by the incredible Mexican muralists of the day.

In 1934, Gordon was contracted to design murals on public buildings in post offices in Texas and California, a high school in Los Angeles, and, closer to home, a monumental mural for the Ventura County Post Office that depicts “Industry and Agriculture in Ventura County.” This mural still exists today and is an official Ventura City Landmark.

In the early 1920s, Campbell’s exhibits of his woodblocks had earned him praise and acknowledgement. His growing success as an artist, however, did not translate into a living wage, so in 1934, he quit the PWAP and went to work for Walt Disney Studios in Hollywood. There, he turned his artistic talents toward animation. Every weekend, however, found him back in Santa Barbara to visit friends or in the mountains and deserts camping with that self-same group.

In 1940, Campbell’s brother Gordon died in a tragic accident at George F. Steedman’s Casa del Herrero. Gordon, who had taken up silver smithing at Steedman’s studio, had picked up a miniature silver cannon. As he peered into the barrel, his cigarette inadvertently lit the fuse and the cannon fired. He died instantly. It was up to Campbell’s good friend Jack Hamilton to deliver the tragic news.

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WAY IT WAS

(left) Peake’s image of a stylized steer may have preceded his eventual cubist approach. (top right) Katie Peake’s image of a winged horse reveals her training

by Joe De Yong. (below) Channing’s image of a unicorn startling a nude young woman was bound to distract the chess players.

Channing Peake

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hanning Peake and Campbell Grant first met at the California School of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. In 1930, both enrolled in the Santa Barbara School of the Arts and collaborated on a children’s book about the Chumash.

Peake learned silversmithing at Steedman’s Casa del Herrero and joined Joe De Yong and Will James in a mural project at El Paseo.

He became enamored of Channing Peake poses before his Mexican mural painting monumental mural of Fiesta circa 1984. and made many trips to (Photo by Jesse Alexander – Courtesy the Southwest. of the Channing Peake Estate) In 1934, Dudley Carpenter joined him for the first part of a trip to Mexico where Peake hoped to study with muralists Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. He was doomed to disappointment, however, and returned to the U.S. to enroll in the Art Students League of New York, living for a time with Jack Hamilton, who was also in New York.

In 1936, he enrolled in a course on mural painting by Rico Lebrun, who was teaching at the League at the time. He fulfilled two public mural projects with Lebrun and studied life painting with him as well. While there, he reconnected with Catherine Anne (Katie) Schott, whom he had met in Santa Barbara where her parents had a second home. His fate was sealed, and he and Katie married in 1938.

The newlyweds moved to Santa Barbara and purchased a ranch in Santa Ynez, which they named Rancho Jabali. Rico Lebrun was a frequent guest at Rancho Jabali, as were many other artist friends. There, on the bucolic, peaceful ranch, Peake was free to pursue his art. By the 1940s and ‘50s, Peake 198

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came into his own as an artist. Reviewers were excited by his cubist framework and sheer force of design and color, and exhibitions of his work proliferated.

In 1959, continuing problems led Peake and Katie to divorce. Though his personal life remained troubled, his artistic endeavors continued to be successful. In 1975, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art honored him with a retrospective exhibition. Today, the Channing Peake Gallery of the Santa Barbara County Administration Building, which is overseen by the County Art in Public Places Committee, hosts an eclectic array of rotating exhibits. In 2011, his monumental mural, Fiesta, which had originally hung in the Gold Room of El Paseo Restaurant, was restored and placed at the Santa Barbara Airport.

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WAY IT WAS

Rico Lebrun

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hen he arrived in Santa Barbara in 1938, Italian-born Rico Lebrun was already an established artist in a variety of genres ranging from monumental frescoes to fashion designs and advertising. His style was influenced by the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the artists Picasso and Goya. He taught drawing, mural design, and fresco painting at the Art Students League in 1936. It’s almost certain that he met Jack Hamilton and others of the group at that time.

In 1940, Disney Studios had been working on an animated version of Felix Salten’s “Bambi” for three years.

That year, Disney hired Lebrun to teach the animators how to draw the structure and movement of animals. Lebrun worked with Campbell Grant and three other Santa Barbara artists at this time. That same year he married Elaine Leonard, his second wife. Both he and Elaine contributed squares to the Hamilton Chessboard.

Lebrun was a frequent guest at Rancho Jabali and was commissioned to sculpt a bust of Katie Peake. Channing thought the two were becoming “a bit too friendly,” as grandson Ziggy tells it, and Lebrun, already well-known as a womanizer, was thrown off the ranch. Nevertheless, Lebrun would continue his connection to Santa Barbara, though his passions, art, and prominence often took him to other national and international locations to paint, exhibit, and teach. In 1940 he had his first solo exhibition in Santa Barbara. From 1945-46 he was artist-in-residence and lecturer for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. In 1962, he served as Regent Lecturer at UC Santa Barbara. (top) One of Rico Lebrun’s contributions to the chessboard. (right) Lebrun’s “downward facing dog” knight is sketchy but suggestive. (below) Lebrun utilized increasing abstractions as in Still Life with Watermelon, which was painted in 1955. (Courtesy of Sullivan Goss – An American Gallery)

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An Eclectic Array of Contributors

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tanford graduate Berkeley (Berk) Anthony was an animator at Disney Studios along with Campbell Grant. He left Disney to join the Navy in 1941 where he worked with the U.S. Naval Photographic Service Depot. He clearly enjoyed chasing the girls in and to Santa Barbara, but he is most remembered for creating the Arizona State University Sun Devil logo in 1947.

Though no longer in use, some say his Sun Devil resembles his former boss, Walt Disney.

Mont Colle

(left) Anthony lived in Los Angeles but his motivation for frequent trips to Santa Barbara is revealed in his drawing for the chessboard. (above) Berkeley Anthony with his famous logo, the Arizona State Sun Devil.

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lizabeth “Blossom” Owen grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and Montecito, California, where her parents had a second home.

She was a classmate of Campbell Grant at the Santa Barbara School of the Arts, and for a short time she was his girlfriend, as well. He inscribed the first of his series of 35 woodblock prints to her. Her parents were supportive of her art and hosted her artist friends at charade parties at their home on El Bosque Road. She enrolled in the Art Students League in New York in 1935 where she met up with Ted Carpenter and Jack Hamilton, the latter recovering from polio in the hospital.

In June 1939, she married rancher Stanley Hollister of the pioneer W. W. Hollister family. She seems to be the only one of the female chessboard artists who continued with her art. In 1956, the Hollisters moved to Nevada where they ranched for many years and Blossom became active with the Nevada Artists Association.

Her contribution to the chessboard echoed the Disney aspect of the drawings with a whimsical elephant on roller skates. (above) Whimsical, roller-skating elephant by Blossom Hollister. (left) Blossom Owen painting a portrait of Marge, daughter of the William Haywards at their home on upper Santa Barbara Street in 1938. (Courtesy Amos Thomas) (right) Dudley Carpenter took up sculpture during the Depression and created busts of many of his artist friends like Blossom Owen, seen here. (Courtesy Santa Barbara Historical Museum)

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WAY IT WAS

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riginally from New York, Richard “Dick” Bond’s family moved to Santa Barbara in 1913 when he was 10 years old. He attended private preparatory schools and earned a graduate degree in biology from Yale in 1933. He and his wife lived in Mission Canyon during 1939-40 while he worked on scientific projects relating to the Channel Islands. He connected and reconnected with the chessboard group at this time. Though he was the only one of the gang who was not an as- (left) Bond’s contribution resembles a microscopic organism, perhaps a parasitic Giardia. (right) Possibly piring artist, he was nevertheless a an arthropod of some sort. talented draftsman. His contributions to the chessboard are not fantastical or abstract drawings, but most likely enlargements of microscopic life. He later moved to the U.S. Virgin Islands and became an influential force in their agricultural programs.

(right) Joe’s contribution to the chessboard reveals a great sense of humor, and perhaps a commentary, as the artist paints on the ass of an ass, allowing the tail to tell the tale. (above) Joe De Yong sketching en plein air accompanied by his horse. (Courtesy Santa Barbara Historical Museum) (below) Joe De Yong painted the West he experienced as in this painting of a high mountain pack train crossing a wide river. (Courtesy Santa Barbara Historical Museum)

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oe De Yong was a budding range rider and movie cowboy when meningitis left him permanently deaf. To pass the time during his recovery, he took up painting and was later mentored by Charlie Russell. He arrived in Santa Barbara in 1925 at the urging of Russell’s friend and fellow Western artist, Ed Borein, who recommended De Yong take a sculpting class at the School of the Arts. During the lean years of the Depression, Joe found work as a costume designer and technical advisor for Cecil B. DeMille.

In 1933, De Yong taught horsemanship and art to Katie “Buck” Schott when she was only 15 years old. He said she was the slickest rider and had the best instinctive hand with a rope he’d ever seen. She also was the only girl he’d ever met who, he felt, could be a real Cowboy Artist.

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WAY IT WAS

(left) In a departure from his normal subject matter, Gamble drew bold saguaro cacti reaching high into the sky along with a rising moon. (above) John Gamble became known for his vast landscapes of colorful poppies. During the reinvention of Santa Barbara after the 1925 earthquake, he became known as Santa Barbara’s “color czar.” (Courtesy Santa Barbara Historical Museum) ( lower left) John Gamble en plein air as he captures the glory of a Santa Barbara spring.

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ohn Marshall Gamble was considered the dean of Santa Barbara artists. He was already an established artist by the time he came to Santa Barbara after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake had destroyed his studio. He became well-known for his paintings of wildflower-filled landscapes. He taught at the Santa Barbara School of the Arts, was a founder of the Santa Barbara Art League in 1924, and was a driving force in the building and establishment of the Faulkner Gallery. He remained involved with civic improvements throughout his life, and he was involved in the reconstruction of Santa Barbara after the 1925 earthquake.

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(above right) Hyde used his illuminist style to create a bishop for the chessboard. (right) Dudley Carpenter’s portrait of Robert Wilson Hyde. (left) The Ceylon Court Guestbook was created by Charles F. Eaton and illuminated by Robert Wilson Hyde. (Courtesy of Laurent J. Torno) WINTER

wenty-seven-year-old Robert Wilson Hyde came to Santa Barbara in 1902 where Hyde, who had abandoned a life in the ministry, devoted himself instead to the revival of the medieval art of book illumination. He formed a connection with Arts and Crafts artisan Charles Frederick Eaton of Montecito’s Riso Rivo (today’s El Mirador) estate.

Hyde often illuminated the leather and brass books that Eaton produced. He became involved in many aspects of the Community Arts Association, loaning furnishings from his antique business for stage sets, taking roles in plays, and supporting the School of the Arts.

In 1939, Hyde’s studio and antiques business sat next to Carpenter’s, so it was easy for him to create a square for Jack Hamilton’s chessboard. Besides, his son had married Hamilton’s sister Dorothy, who died in childbirth in 1924.

He was Susan Borden Hyde’s grandfather.

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orn in Uruguay to an English banker father in 1886, Malcolm Thurburn was a writer, musician, artist, composer, designer of stage sets, and painter of mural and symbolic subjects. Since childhood, he had shocked his family with fantastical, visionary drawings filled with mystic symbols and bizarre conceptions of heaven and hell. He settled in Santa Barbara in 1924, and two years later, Dudley Carpenter held an exhibition of his work in Carpenter’s new studio at 322 E. Canon Perdido Street.

Carpenter involved Thurburn with the Community Arts Players where he designed costumes and sets, as did Carpenter. His abstract and monumental set design for the Community Arts Players’ 1926 production of Peer Gynt set off a heated artistic controversy.

The square he drew for the chessboard depicts a muscular cherub playing a harp with a sash that looks a bit like the tail of a devil.

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nd lastly, architect and artist Anna Louise Murphy Vhay, who arrived in Santa Barbara circa 1919 along with her husband and two sons. She designed a Spanish-Colonial style home for her family on the woodlands of the eastern Riviera and called it El Arbolado. Vhay then joined the nascent movement to preserve the historic adobes of Santa Barbara by purchasing the Gonzalez-Ramirez adobe at 825 Laguna Street. She remodeled the humble, dirt-floored abode into a romantic Spanish hacienda that became a National Historic Landmark in 1979. She is also responsible for developing the artists’ enclave of nine cottages on El Caserio Lane and designed the initial buildings for Laguna Cottages for Seniors.

In the late 1930s, she and son David Vhay traveled to Mexico to photograph, draw, and study the details of Spanish Colonial architecture. Their book Architectural Byways in New Spain was published in 1939. Louise was a neighbor WINTER

(left) Vhay’s voluptuous mermaid caught the notice of the 1939 society editor and fit the playful erotic undertone of the chessboard. (above) in the background jousting knights and armies are at war, all for the love of the Queen.

to Dudley Carpenter and their yards adjoined each other, facilitating their joint Fiesta party each year for their artist friends and others.

(Sources: contemporary news articles; theater programs; ancestry.com resources; obituaries, Roxanne Grant Lapidus’s excellent article for Noticias entitled “Brothers in Art”; www.channingpeake.com; Rebecca Bachman, “Airport Unveils New Terminal Building,” Santa Barbara Independent, June 20, 2011; San Francisco Examiner 2 Aug 1914; theater programs; Mildred Couper papers at UCSB Special Collections; City Directories; www.islapedia.com/index.php?title=BOND,_Richard_M; Santa Barbara Independent, Michael Redmon, “Robert Hyde: a founder of SB’s Arts and Crafts Colony”; Phoenix Arizona Historical Images; alphabettenthletter.blogspot.com/2021/09/school-days-berk-anthony-and-sparky-sun.html, accessed Aug 23, 2023; William Reynolds, Joe De Yong: A Life in the West, p 89; Many thanks to Roxanne Lapidus, Ziggy Peake, Thomas Van Stein, Dudley Carpenter, John and David Hamilton, and Thomas Moore for multiple consultations and input.)

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MEET VICTORIA HOLLY:

THE DESIGNER BEHIND CALIFORNIA'S STUNNING INTERIORS

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tep into the world of California's most inviting interiors, curated by the exceptional eye of Victoria Holly. Victoria Holly Interiors brings the essence of California living to life. Victoria’s approach isn't just about design; it's about revealing her clients’ unique style and weaving it throughout their home. From the build and renovation process to finishing touches, she and her team orchestrate the entire journey to ensure that every space becomes a work of art.

What distinguishes Victoria is her personal touch.

Collaborating closely with clients, she captures their style and lifestyle, resulting in interiors that are as practical as they are beautiful.

“Everyone should live in their dream home.”

– Victoria Holly

The firm’s goal is to design interiors that feel like an extension of your personality—crafting a home where you can relax, entertain, and thrive. Every piece, fabric, and color is carefully chosen to harmonize and create spaces that are not just beautiful, but functional and luxurious.

Craftsmanship is also at the heart of Victoria's approach, utilizing high-quality and custom furnishings and pieces that stand up to the rigors of everyday life while exuding elegance. Resulting in spaces that are as durable as they are stylish and spaces where you can create memories and stories for years to come.

In addition to her design work, Victoria has an art collection known as The Holly Collective, a line of textured minimalist paintings. Her interior design expertise and unique artistic touch have earned her features in national and international publications, as well as numerous awards and accolades.

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MOVEMENT

IS LIFE:

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IF THERE IS ANY SECRET TO LONGEVITY, THESE PEOPLE MAY HAVE CRACKED THE CODE

BY MICHELLE EBBIN

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PHOTOS BY KIM REIERSON

ccording to Dr. Marie Bernard, a director at the National Institutes of Health, we’ve had a significant increase in lifespan over the last century. “Now if you make it to 65, the likelihood that you’ll make it to 85 is very high. And if you make it to 85, the likelihood that you’ll make it to 92 is very high.”

As lifespans increase, the emphasis is not just on quantity of years, or ‘lifespan,’ but of course the quality of those years, or ‘healthspan.’ The goal is to live as long as possible while maintaining a vital body and a sharp mind.

While there’s no magic pill to slow aging, research shows movement is crucial for long-term physical, mental, and emotional well-being. How we move matters. Learning to move correctly for your body is key, whether you’re an athlete, weekend warrior, or just want to stay strong and pain-free. And as the link between physical activity and longevity grows clearer, there’s no better time to explore Variant Training Lab in Santa Barbara.

Variant Training Lab (VTL) integrates science, tech, and cutting-edge strategies to optimize health through improved movement.

This 2D and 3D video motion capture system is the gold standard by which we objectively measure human kinematics – the angles and moments that comprise one's completely unique approach to movement

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Dynamometry is the only way to measure strength and power. The 200 muscles in the body possess infinitely combinatorial degrees of freedom. Dynamometry maps your personal mechanics to a truly customized workout program.

MOVE IT OR LOSE IT

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ounded by Dr. Maury Hayashida, VTL employs stateof-the-art technology to assess, train, and educate their clients. The facility has an interdisciplinary staff of physical therapists, coaches, data scientists, physicians, nutritionists, and psychologists. Together they analyze, diagnose, and 210

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customize training and treatments, and enhance each member’s movement.

Dr. Hayashida developed VTL’s “Test, Treat, Train” process involving testing strength and mobility, addressing injuries and needs, and optimizing movement, conditioning, and goals.

This is repeated every six to eight weeks allowing ongoing measurement and comparison to baseline data. Measurement gives a clear view of your real-time body progress. Flexibility and what they call “prehabilitation” are key. VTL helps its members identify irregularities of motion and other asymmetries before they manifest physically in the body.

To this end, VTL offers data-driven personalized programming to evaluate your body, enhance performance, 2023

Force plates embedded in the floor combine with mobile force plates to measure human kinetics – forces applied to the body during movement and task performance. A joint’s longevity derives from its subjection to compression, shear, and torque during daily movement.

physical therapy to reduce pain and promote healing.

Although I didn’t have an injury, I learned to minimize aches and potentially avoid surgery.

The ‘Train’ phase transformed my perspective on working out. My test data provided guidance on precise exercises to target muscles needing strengthening. After just a few sessions, I felt stronger and more balanced.

I realized the vital role of test data in tailoring training for me. Measuring and addressing how the body moves before exercise is key for long-term strength and freedom from pain.

Movement is the cornerstone of health and longevity, offering not just a longer lifespan but optimizing the quality of those years.

and improve well-being. It provides individualized education, semi-private and private training sessions, group classes, and direct medical access.

Dr. Hayashida views VTL as “body mechanics” helping individuals achieve and maintain optimal life performance through testing, treating, and training. He states, “We use exercise to achieve fitness and optimize capacity. What sets us apart is we also develop your ‘movement DNA’ through a weekly, if not daily, process of testing, treating, and training your movement.”

I recently tried VTL’s “Test, Treat, Train” process. The comprehensive computerized movement assessments analyzed my strength and mobility in detail. All data was explained and made accessible through an app for further home study.

In the ‘Treat’ phase, my specific challenges were addressed via 212

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WWW.VARIANTTRAININGLAB.COM

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The Weekender

By Gabe Saglie

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley

President Reagan and Nancy Reagan with Michael Deaver and Mary Jane Wick viewing three models of the proposed Reagan Presidential Library in 1986.

(Photo courtesy of the Reagan Library)

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he Simi Valley site of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library smacks of serendipity. Its original location was slated to be Stanford University, a plan that fell through mere weeks before groundbreaking was set to begin. The sudden change led to a small group of landowners, and fans of Mr. Reagan, to donate 100 acres of undulating, undeveloped land in Simi Valley, and the rest is history at its finest.

“He was amazed at how big it was,” recalls Garrick Newman, a 28-year veteran of the U.S. Secret Service who spent a decade in charge of the security detail for President Reagan, both during his time in the White House, as well as many of the years that followed his two terms. He accompanied the former president on his first visit to the site of his future library, shortly before construction began in 1988, and fondly remembers the emotion Mr. Reagan expressed at the property’s vastness and beauty.

“He loved the outdoors,” continues Mr. Newman, a Westlake Village resident, “and, in many ways, the Simi location resembled the Santa Barbara ranch that he enjoyed so much.”

The Reagan Library, in fact, marks the halfway point between what was the Reagans’ Bel Air home at the time and Rancho del Cielo, their sprawling 700-acre ranch along the Santa Ynez Mountains, where “he’d escape for three or four days as often as he could, because it meant he could be alone,” remembers Mr. Newman. Mr. Reagan appreciated the Library’s strategic location.

And when it was dedicated in 1991, it marked the first time in American history that five U.S Presidents – Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan, himself – gathered in the same place.

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The Weekender

Today, the Reagan Presidential Library has become the very beacon its namesake citizen hoped for. “He wanted the library to not just be a place where scholars interpret the past,” says Chief Marketing Officer Melissa Giller, “but a dynamic forum where they debate the future.” Political and military experts present speeches here often. Thought leaders hold conferences here often. The Republican Presidential Debate that it hosted in September was the fifth such civic event it has presented since 2007.

A mile-long drive up Presidential Drive leads guests to Spanish Mission-style buildings and the expansive terrain with the sweeping views that once took Mr. Reagan’s breath away. The library has since purchased an extra 200 acres around the main buildings to ensure nothing is ever developed there, forever preserving those sweeping vistas.

Admission tickets grant access to the Reagan Museum – 18 galleries that hold hundreds of artifacts and feature dozens of displays, which spotlight everything from Mr. Reagan’s childhood and early career as a radio announcer and actor to the political life that includes myriad seminary moments, both domestically and globally, in the 1970s and 1980s.

Among interactive opportunities: acting virtually in a movie with Mr. Reagan; setting the table for a formal dinner at the Reagan White House; and riding a horse alongside the President at Rancho del Cielo.

The tour includes a walk through an Oval Office replica that showcases the Reagan touches that made the historic room his own, from a collection of Western art, including a collection of bronze saddles, to the famous jellybean jar atop the Resolute desk.

One of the real stunners is the Air Force One Pavilion, home to Air Force One 27000, the aircraft that served seven U.S. presidents between 1973 and 2001. On loan from the Air Force, it flew President Reagan more than 660,000 miles to 26 countries and 46 U.S. states. Guests get a chance to enter and walk the length of the plane, which often carried Mr. Newman right alongside the president he was protecting. “When I first walked through it, I remember thinking it

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(above) Statues of President Reagan, like this one by sculptor Douglas Van Howd, are featured on the library’s grounds. (left) President Reagan and Nancy Reagan breaking ground for the library in 1988. (below) The library sits amidst the view of Simi Valley’s sunsoaked hillside. (Photos courtesy of the Reagan Library)

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The Weekender

was huge,” he says, adding with a chuckle, “and now it feels pretty small to me!”

Dedicated in 2005, the Pavilion’s main calling card is the spectacular view – all windows, towering more than three stories above Ventura County’s backcountry and enclosing more than 90,000 square feet of space. The hangar is also home to a retired presidential chopper, Marine One, as well as a Reagan presidential limousine and Secret Service Suburban. The hangar’s snack shop is an actual pub that Mr. Reagan visited on a trip to Ireland in 1984 and that was subsequently dismantled and transported to the library in his honor.

When guests stroll the west-facing exterior grounds, they’re walking across replicas of the White House Rose Garden and the White House South Lawn. There’s a towering hunk of the Berlin Wall, which toppled in 1989, something for which Mr. Reagan gets significant credit. Colorful flowers and butterflies on one side, graffitied in black and gray on the other. A new Gold Star Families Memorial Monument

honors the families of the servicemen and women who died while serving in the military. And the final resting place for Mr. and Mrs. Reagan is found here as well.

“In the middle of the funeral service, when things had just gotten quiet, all of a sudden, we heard the neighing of a horse coming from one of the ranches in the valley below,” recalls Mr. Newman, who attended President Reagan’s burial at the library on June 11, 2004. “Some of us chuckled, but knowing his love for horses, we were all moved.”

Nancy Reagan was buried here on March 11, 2016. And on February 6 each year, on Mr. Reagan’s birthday, their burial site hosts a celebration, complete with patriotic music, a wreath-laying, and a 21-gun salute. The event is open to the public and free to attend.

The Library hosts two large-scale historical exhibits a year, which draw thousands of visitors. The latest, the hugely popular and thought-provoking exhibition, “Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away,” has been extended by popular demand through January 2024. Featuring more than 700 Holocaust artifacts, photos, and displays, it has drawn close to 150,000 people from all 50 states and many countries, as well as close to 200 school groups. Buying date-specific tickets for exhibitions ahead of time, through the library website, is strongly recommended.

Visitors to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library should plan on a three- to four-hour visit to fully enjoy the galleries and grounds. General admission pricing starts at $29.95, with discounts for children, students, and seniors; active military personnel are welcome free of charge. Plan your visit at www.reaganfoundation.org. (left) A piece of the Berlin Wall now resides at the library. (below) Visitors can explore the library’s impressive Air Force One Pavilion during their visit.

(Photo courtesy of the Reagan Library)

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The Weekender

WHERE TO STAY: THE WESTLAKE VILLAGE INN This picturesque 4-Star escape puts you in the heart of Westlake Village, about 15 minutes from the Reagan Library. Set on 17 manicured acres, it’s a Mediterranean-inspired escape, with cobblestone pathways, gardens, and its own lake. The vineyards that front the property provide grapes for the hotel’s proprietary label. Among the 166 rooms, which see ongoing renovations, is the Ronald Reagan Suite, with a two-sided fireplace, and donned with White House memorabilia, Reagan portraits, and books and even a souvenir jellybean jar; Ron and Nancy Reagan stayed here, as well as politicos like Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney. Visit the Stonehaus enoteca for rustic breakfasts and wines by the glass in the afternoon; Bogie’s is popular for late-night cocktails and live music. The luxe $25 million spa opened in 2020. westlakevillageinn.com.

WHERE TO EAT: MEDITERRANEO The signature bistro at the Westlake Village Inn underwent a transformation in 2019 and, with indoor and outdoor seating, exudes a European open-air villa vibe. A lengthy list of handcrafted cocktails and an expansive wine list focused on California, Italy, and France complement a seasonally-driven, farm-to-table menu from Chef Lisa Biondi. Steaks are seared inside a 1,500-degree grill and pastas are handmade daily. Brunch features the classics, like Eggs Benedict, Huevos Rancheros, and Avocado Toast. Dinner winners include the Tagliatelle Bolognese, with a ragu of slow-simmered beef, pork, and veal, the Grilled Octopus, seared tender and served with fingerling potatoes and a red wine vinaigrette, and various Roman pizzas, with a crisp and airy crust. med-rest.com.

WHERE TO SIP WINE: NABU WINES Some of the best sipping south of Santa Barbara, NABU’s portfolio features wines from both Napa (NA) and Malibu (BU). Vineyards along the cooler Malibu coast, as well as Topanga Canyon, produce pinot noir and chardonnay, while the warmer Napa region generates robust reds including cabernet sauvignon and merlot. The tasting room, just off Westlake Boulevard in Westlake Village, is open seven days a week, with live music and food truck visits on weekends (reservations recommended). Owner Greg Barnett is a regular fixture. NABU is often a best-of winner from readers of publications like the Los Angeles Times and Ventura County Star. nabuwines.com.

OAK & IRON A sophisticated speakeasy vibe makes Oak & Iron a locals’ favorite. A hidden gem along Thousand Oaks Boulevard in the heart of Thousand Oaks, the original craft cocktails are inspired by locally- and seasonally-available ingredients – a garden-to-glass concept from owner Andrew Pletcher that drives an impressive, creative lineup of unique sippers, including originals like the Brown Butter Manhattan and vodka-based Lavender Rigby. VarWINTER

ious events, such as guided bourbon tasting and charcuterie parties, are scheduled throughout the month. Sign up for an hour-long bartending lesson. oakandiron.com.

WHERE TO START THE DAY: THE BAKER’S DAUGHTERS Demand for its baked goods grew so quickly after its January 2023 opening that The Baker’s Daughters had to shutter for much of the summer to expand its kitchen. Located in Simi Valley and less than five miles from the Ronald Reagan Library, the bakery-café offers breakfast all day, like the Bacon-Egg-Cheese Biscuit with sweet pepper jelly and the Avocado Toast served with pickled red onions and a sunny-sideup egg. Best-seller sandwiches include the Braised Short Rib Grilled Cheese and The Cubano. The house-made sourdough undergoes a 24-hour natural fermentation. Many of the recipes are inspired by owner Yasmin Almeida’s native Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. thebdbakery.com.

WHERE TO PLAY: UNDERWOOD FAMILY FARMS The Underwood family has been growing produce in Ventura County since 1867. Both of the family’s farm locations – one in Somis and one in Moorpark – are open daily and offer you-pick experiences, allowing guests to harvest in-season fruits and vegetables right from the ground.

Online calendars are updated every Thursday with the dozens of fruits and vegetables that are in-season and available that week. “Raspberries and blackberries wrap up by mid-November, then it’s the winter veggies – more cauliflower, broccoli, lettuces, and radishes,” says fifth-generation farmer, and the company’s marketing manager, Suzannah Underwood.

“Carrots are year-round.” The Moorpark location, a 200-acre plot, of which 50 acres are open to the public, also offers educational farm tours and an animal center with petting and feeding opportunities. There are also seasonal family-friendly activities throughout the year, including an Easter Festival in spring and visits with Santa and his reindeer at Christmas. underwoodfamilyfarms.com.

WHERE TO BE WELL: THE FOUR SEASONS WESTLAKE VILLAGE The spa inside the 12-acre Four Seasons Westlake Village, set just off Highway 101 in Westlake Village, has long been known for its deluxe digs and its Center for Health and Wellbeing, with a wide range of massage, facial, and therapeutic services. The oasis has just expanded its focus on wellness by opening a new 7,000-square-foot state-of-theart CURE Medical facility, offering travelers a wide range of medical and medical spa services. Guests can book Botox, skin-tightening, and body-contouring appointments; skin services include peels and hydrafacials; UV drips focus on weight loss and detox; and vitamin shots feature CoQ10, B12, and biotin. There are also a range of treatments – hyperbaric, lymphatic, and stem cell, among others – as well as scalp care and 24/7 physician care. fourseasons.com/westlakevillage.

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REAL ESTATES THE SANCTUARY

PREMIER MONTECITO ESTATE

BUTTERFLY BEACH MASTERPIECE

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ocated on prestigious Padaro Lane and set on 12.07 acres of bluff-front property, this exceptional offering combines three separate parcels and offers an idyllic blend of privacy, luxury, and natural beauty.

2779/2777/2773 Padaro Lane, Carpinteria $80,000,000 Riskin Partners Estate Group 805-565-8600 Village Properties 01815307 / 01447045 / 01954177 / 0195106

875 & 885 Park Lane, Montecito $43,500,000 Riskin Partners Estate Group 805-565-8600 Village Properties 01815307 / 01447045 / 01954177 / 01951069

estled at the end of Channel Drive, steps from Butterfly Beach, the Four Seasons, and Montecito village, this premier oceanfront estate is an unrivaled masterpiece.

1104 Channel Drive, Montecito $38,500,000 Riskin Partners Estate Group 805-565-8600 Village Properties 01815307 / 01447045 / 01954177 / 01951069

HOLLISTER RANCH SANCTUARY

ONE-OF-A-KIND HOPE RANCH

LUXURY OJAI HORSE RANCH

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his spectacular +/- 102-acre parcel stands in its own class as one of the most private and secure compounds on the coast of Southern California. The ultimate in ranch living, with pastures, horse stalls, trails, gardens, a private well, and much more.

89 Hollister Ranch Road, Gaviota $33,000,000 Emily Kellenberger & Associates 805-252-2773 Village Properties DRE# 01397913 220

ncredible views of the ocean, harbor, and twinkling city lights define the horizon at this premier Montecito estate. The adjacent ocean-view residence offers additional options for privacy, guests, or staff.

ne-of-a-kind property! Panoramic ocean & mountain views from level homesite.

Two parcels in Hope Ranch on private, usable 5.5 acres. Opening north & south to breathtaking views. Lighted tennis court, detached guest quarters, gated driveway & garages for 6 cars.

4475 Via Abrigada, Santa Barbara $22,500,000 Randy Solakian Estates Group 805-886-6000 Coldwell Banker Realty DRE# 00622258 WINTER

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spen Grove Ranch: a luxury, 177-acre horse ranch in Upper Ojai. Spectacular main residence and two 3bd/2ba guest houses on 5 legal lots. Two barns, stables, arena, round pen, and hot-walker. A truly unique property with exquisite facilities, stunning beauty, and spacious luxury.

7887 Ojai Santa Paula Road, Ojai $18,500,000 Patty Waltcher 805-340-3774 Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties DRE# 01176473

REAL ESTATES PANORAMIC OCEANVIEW ESTATE

LET YOUR STORY BEGIN

GOLDEN QUADRANGLE ESTATE

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xperience luxury living in this newly renovated, 7,070-sq.-ft. estate with panoramic ocean views on 2.8 usable acres. Situated above Montecito Golf Course, the property boasts an open-concept design, many outdoor entertaining areas, pool, and numerous high-end features.

1035 Alston Road, Montecito $16,850,000 Crysta Metzger 805-453-8700 Coldwell Banker Realty DRE# 01340521

mbracing a timeless ambiance and the classic Montecito experience, this multiacre Glen Oaks estate unfolds slowly as you drive through gates and down a picturesque driveway. An impeccable 4-bed, single-level residence and stylish 2-bed guest house await.

Settle in and savor your Montecito sanctuary.

rare and exclusive 2-parcel offering located in Montecito’s “Golden Quadrangle” with endless ocean views, and totaling 6 acres with a single-level 4 bedroom, 5 1/2-bath home, & 1-acre Chardonnay vineyard.

1492 & 1496 East Mountain Drive, Montecito $15,000,000 Rachael Douglas 805-318-0900 Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties DRE# 02024147

1781 Glen Oaks Drive, Montecito $16,000,000 Nancy Kogevinas 805-450-6233 Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties DRE# 01209514

PRIVATE MONTECITO SANCTUARY

ARCHITECTURAL OCEANVIEW ESTATE

OCEANVIEW RESORT-STYLE RETREAT

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nchanting private sanctuary retreat, 3+ acres with mature Oaks, Redwoods, and fruit trees. Designed by Lockwood de Forest.

Retractable walls of glass create indoor/outdoor living. Complemented by large one-bedroom guest house, outdoor kitchen, and an infinity pool with ocean views, all in complete privacy.

930 Knollwood Drive, Montecito $12,850,000 Randy Solakian Estates Group 805-886-6000 DRE# 00622258

asa Bene, an architecturally remarkable contemporary estate situated on a knolltop location, offers breathtaking views of the ocean, islands, harbor, city, and mountains.

811 Camino Viejo, Santa Barbara $9,995,000 Cristal Clarke 805-886-9378 Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties DRE# 00968247

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oastal living at your doorstep! Resort-style home boasts picturesque ocean views that will have you feeling miles away, yet minutes to town.

This home offers a luxurious primary suite, pool, cabana, and a charming 1-bedroom guest house.

4040 Marina Drive, Santa Barbara $8,995,000 Team Scarborough 805-331-1465 Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties DRE# 01182792

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REAL ESTATES MODERN ARCHITECTURAL GEM

NEW CONSTRUCTION IN MONTECITO

UPDATED MONTECITO ESTATE

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ew construction resting on 2.76 private acres, this modern estate enjoys 360-degree ocean and mountain views. Clad with floor-to-ceiling glass, concrete, steel, and wood structure, the main residence, guest house, and pool are truly works of art.

2805 Spyglass Ridge Road, Santa Barbara $8,750,000 Calcagno & Hamilton Real Estate Group 805-565-4000 Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties DRE# 01499736 / 01129919

irnam Wood has never looked better! Beautiful updates and an ideal floor plan offer an enviable lifestyle for full-time residents or as a part-time home. Three gracious bedroom suites, located on different wings of the home, ensure private accommodations.

1975 Inverness Lane, Montecito $7,995,000 Riskin Partners Estate Group 805-565-8600 Village Properties 01815307 / 01447045 / 01954177 / 01951069

515 Santa Angela Lane, Santa Barbara $8,450,000 Zia Group | Daniel Zia | Broker Associate 805-364-9009 Zia Group DRE# 01710544 | eXp Realty DRE# 01878277

RARE MONTECITO HISTORY

PRIVATE MONTECITO RETREAT

ICONIC OCEANVIEW SITE

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ocated in Montecito’s Hedgerow, this 1929 French Normandy-style home boasts verdant landscaping, lush gardens, and ample living spaces. Designed by George Washington Smith, this rare estate represents a unique opportunity to acquire a piece of Montecito history.

175 Miramar Ave, Montecito Price - $7,500,000 Tyler Kallenbach 805-695-2533 Compass DRE# 02021945

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ewly built, stunning single-level 4-bed, 4-bath home & detached ADU, designed

by Ferguson-Ettinger Architects. Luxurious living with 26’ pocket doors that open to the pool terrace, and a Napa Valley winery-inspired fireplace. Enjoy life in the coveted Golden Quadrangle!

iscover what it’s like to live in tandem with nature on this private 6.41-acre property with panoramic ocean and mountain views, meandering creek, and a hidden island. Here, nostalgia for a simpler era can now become reality.

2870 East Valley Road, Santa Barbara $6,750,000 Marsha Kotlyar Estate Group 805-565 4014 Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties DRE# 01426866

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tunning ocean-view building site with fully approved plans by The Warner Group! Situated atop Santa Barbara’s iconic Riviera, this incredible 1.81-acre property has panoramic views of the ocean, harbor, downtown, and the mountains.

1326 Hillcrest Road, Santa Barbara $5,000,000 Riskin Partners Estate Group 805-565-8600 Village Properties 01815307 / 01447045 / 01954177 / 01951069

REAL ESTATES SECLUDED MONTECITO GEM

PRIME MONTECITO PARCEL

SPANISH MOUNTAIN RETREAT

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magnificent, post-modern home nestled in the foothills and surrounded by an acre of mature oak trees, providing ample shade and multiple outdoor areas to experience all the magic of this secluded Montecito gem.

195 East Mountain Drive, Montecito $4,900,000 Gary Goldberg 805-455-8910 Coastal Properties DRE# 01172139

xceptional location meets storybook serenity on this 1.52-acre buildable parcel in the sought-after Riven Rock community. Rich in history and inherent beauty, this Montecito parcel is calling for owners as equally exceptional to build their dream estate.

xquisite two-story Spanish retreat with unparalleled mountain views. Extensively remodeled in November 2022, this residence will please the most discerning eye. Welcome to your 3-bedroom, 4-bath dream home in the heart of Santa Barbara’s desirable Mesa neighborhood.

800 Rockbridge Road, Montecito $3,995,000 Marsha Kotlyar Estate Group 805-565-4014 Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties DRE# 01426866

1215 Miracanon Lane, Santa Barbara $4,275,000 Grubb Campbell Group 805-895-6226 Village Properties DRE# 01236143

TURN-KEY MONTECITO HOME

SUNNY SAN ROQUE CHARMER

LUXURIOUS POLO FIELD RETREAT

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vailable fully furnished with a history of strong rental income, this turn-key home offers opportunities. At the end of a tranquil lane on approx. 0.44 acres, situated within the Coastal Zone & Montecito Union School District.

161 Loureyro Road, Montecito $3,495,000 Marsha Kotlyar Estate Group 805-565-4014 Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties DRE# 01426866

ecently renovated, this bright San Roque home is perched on a sunny corner lot with lovely views, including ocean and island peeks.

Cheerful & welcoming, this 1,960-sq-ft home maintains a contemporary, open feel with seamless indoor/outdoor living.

3241 Lucinda Lane, Santa Barbara $2,250,000 Marsha Kotlyar Estate Group 805-565-4014 Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties DRE# 01426866 WINTER

2023

uxurious condo nestled in the Polo Fields offers one of the most breathtaking vistas of the sprawling green polo grounds, the shimmering ocean, enchanting Santa Barbara Channel Islands, and majestic mountains.

3375 Foothill Rd #931, Carpinteria $2,150,000 Cristal Clarke 805-886-9378 Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties DRE# 00968247

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LUXURY VACATION RENTALS

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rom picturesque beaches on which to spend the day on the sand; to multiple luxury resorts to bask by the pool or enjoy a spa day; to a lively downtown scene with five-star dining, boutique shopping, and historic theaters, Santa Barbara and neighboring towns offer an ideal place to vacation.

PRIVATE MONTECITO MINI-RESORT

BUTTERFLY BEACH RETREAT

OCEANVIEW VACATION RENTAL

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istoric four-acre property is a private mini-resort for your next getaway. Enjoy the pool, beach, and private chef meals. A oneof-a-kind experience!

Paradise Retreats 805-275-1851 Price: Inquire for rates DRE# 02090892

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levate your lifestyle with coastal luxury in this updated 3-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom modernist masterpiece, situated on renowned Butterfly Beach. Enjoy captivating ocean views, recent upgrades, gated privacy, and interior design by Meridith Baer.

1086 Channel Drive Offered at $40,000/month Crysta Metzger 805-453-8700 Coldwell Banker Realty DRE# 01340521

WINTER

2023

vailable as a monthly furnished rental, this stunning multi-level home offers spectacular ocean views, abundant light, and fantastic amenities including a hot tub! Spacious with 4 bedrooms and multiple living spaces, this rental cannot be beat.

845 Centinela Lane, Santa Barbara Price: $15,000/month Samantha Ireland 805-319-4045 Vacation Rentals of Santa Barbara DRE#01751182

REAL ESTATES OUTSIDE THE AREA

35-ACRE MOUNTAIN RETREAT

LUXURY CABO RETREAT

FAMILY-FRIENDLY CABO GETAWAY

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ationally acclaimed property with 20 rentals nestled in the mountains of North Carolina, one hour from Asheville. Perfect family sanctuary, Airbnb village, retreat center, or event venue. Take advantage of lower North Carolina real estate costs! $6,800,000 Tetia McMichael YourMountainSanctuary.com

estled steps from the beach, West Enclave 4 offers a luxurious desert contemporary haven for up to 12 guests. With a beachfront location, stunning outdoor space, six bedrooms, and seamless indoor-outdoor living, it’s a private paradise in an exclusive community.

Ritz Carlton Enclave West Villa #4, Puerto Los Cabos, San José del Cabo, Mexico Rates start at $5,500/night Sun Cabo Vacations 800-710-2226 www.SunCabo.com

WINTER

2023

nwind at Villa Sandcastle, a family-friendly 5-bedroom, 5.5-bath property in the gated El Encanto community. Accommodating 12 guests, it boasts stunning Sea of Cortez views, a private pool, Jacuzzi, and an array of amenities.

Villa Sandcastle, El Encanto, San José del Cabo, Mexico Rates start at $2,000/night Sun Cabo Vacations 800-710-2226 www.SunCabo.com

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Where possibilities become possible

American Riviera was able to meet our tight time constraints and get our home remodel started.

—TREVOR & MARJORIE LARGE, HOMEOWNERS

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Lori Murray, SVP

Thirty three years of banking on the Central Coast

Together we can expand the possibilities for your business!

Visit us at AmericanRiviera.Bank • 805.965.5942

NEWLY CONSTRUCTED SINGLE-LEVEL MODERN HOME & ADU IN MONTECITO

PRESENTED BY DANIEL ZIA

515 Santa Angela Lane Montecito, CA 93108 Designed by Ferguson Ettinger Architects, this newly built single-level 4-bed, 4-bath estate with a detached ADU is located near the heart of Montecito's coveted Upper Village, epitomizing the quintessential California luxury lifestyle.

805.364.9009

Daniel Zia

Jon Gilkeson

Kimberly Rockwell

Broker Associate Realtor Partner DRE#01710544 DRE#01898328

Realtor Partner DRE#01482947

Todd Shea

Alan Siebenaler

Jorden Angel

Realtor Partner Realtor Partner Realtor Partner Realtor Partner Realtor Partner DRE#02028163 DRE#02090649 DRE#02088606 DRE#02080380 DRE#01405400

Realtor Partner DRE#02121165

Alexander Stoeber

Lynda Elliott

Zia Group | Daniel Zia | Broker Associate 2940 De La Vina St, Santa Barbara, CA 93105 Zia Group DRE#01710544 | eXp Realty DRE#01878277

Rafael Mora

Kathleen Rogers

Phillip Savas

Realtor Partner Realtor Partner DRE#02044953 DRE#02113928

ZIAGROUP.COM

Lama Hussein

Josh Tappeiner

Realtor Partner Realtor Partner DRE#02162454 DRE#02206470

Phil Cota Realtor Partner DRE#02141597

SIP BACK AND RELAX FOR MEMBERSHIP INQUIRIES KELLY CAMPBELL Director of Membership Sales kcampbell@tymail.com cell: 805.455.2587

JOHANNA DEARINGER Director of Membership Sales jdearinger@tymail.com cell: 805.276.7669

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