East Coast heirs and heiresses have long lived well in Montecito, California, discovering it as far back as the 1890s. By the Roaring Twenties, half of Hollywood had made it a weekend getaway. Stars and celebrities still reign here, living large in houses old and new.
Our homeowners have created a charming compound for themselves from the out-buildings of an estate first established in 1891 by Philadelphian Isaac C. Waterman. Marc Appleton, architect and noted historian on California architecture, served as their North Star.
Appleton’s clients, who hail from South Africa, originally lived in the carriage house. When an adjacent parcel with a barn and blacksmith’s cottage became available, they snapped it up and began improving the property. Their primary goal was to decamp from the carriage house and make it available to visiting family and friends, and to transform the 19th-century barn into their primary residence.
The barn was a true barn, with a hayloft and a floor grimy from decades of heavy use. It was far from habitable and required quite a clean-up before Appleton began to give it new life. Although the building needed some major sprucing up, client and architect embraced its authenticity. The exterior was stripped of its flaking green paint, dormers were inserted on the second story and the hayloft opening was glazed in, but otherwise, the building retains its existing profile.
Inside, Appleton turned the central breezeway into a living room and dining area and reconfigured the stalls and hayloft as bedrooms, kitchen and library. Expanses of bare wood in ceilings and walls reinforce a sense of the building’s original purpose, while also creating an enveloping warmth. Working without an interior designer, the homeowners artfully deployed their collection of antiques, traditional upholstered pieces, and varied artworks to achieve wonderfully at-ease spaces that manage to look both fresh and time-settled. While hardly minimalist, thanks to an essential restraint, they are endowed with appreciable breathing room.
Although humble compared with the grand estates that put Montecito on the map – and practically primitive compared with the souped-up contemporary residences that dot the area today – this family-oriented compound is impressive in its cohesiveness and simplicity. It is a testament to the fact that scale isn’t everything, and that sometimes, all we need is a place to put our feet up, watch the grandkids play and revel in the late afternoon sun raking across a stone wall.
Photography by Matt Walla.
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