Hope Ranch · Santa Barbara

Behind the three gates.

Estates, oaks, horses, and a private beach. This is Hope Ranch the way I'd explain it to a friend.

Hope Ranch is the other name people reach for when they mean estate living here, and the comparison to Montecito is fair as far as it goes: large lots, privacy, real quiet. The differences are what make the choice. Hope Ranch is more compact, closer to the ocean and to the rest of town, and it is purely residential: there are no shops or restaurants inside the Ranch at all, everything is just outside it. What it keeps inside instead: the private La Cumbre Country Club on Laguna Blanca, resident-only beach access with its cabanas and bathhouses, the Laguna Blanca School campus, and a private web of bridle trails, more than twenty miles of it, winding through the oaks. It is one of the only communities in California where riders on horseback are simply part of the neighborhood.

How it got this way.

Thomas Hope ran sheep on this land starting in 1861; after he died, the railroad bought it and everyone assumed a grand tourist hotel was coming. It never did. In 1908 the owners declared they'd make it a playground of the world, and the country club era began; Laguna Blanca is reputed to have held California's first flat-track horse racing and, in 1872, the state's first steeplechase. The Hope Ranch you see now is mostly Harold Chase's doing: starting in 1923 he scrapped an 800-room hotel plan, planted more than fifty thousand trees, laid the roads and bridle paths, and built the club, whose course was shaped by George Thomas, the same designer behind Riviera and Bel-Air. The horses weren't an amenity added later. They were the founding idea.

The honest part.

The trade is the same one that makes it special. With only a few entrances and no commerce inside, everything, groceries, dinner, coffee, is a drive beyond the gates, and depending on which part of the Ranch you're in, the trip in and out takes real time. Montecito hands you two villages; Hope Ranch hands you quiet and asks you to drive for the rest. For plenty of owners that's precisely the arrangement they wanted. And the location softens it: you're minutes from both downtown and Goleta once you're out, closer to the middle of everything than the seclusion ever lets on.