Summerland · Santa Barbara County

Montecito's little sister.

Tiny, steep, and shining. This is Summerland the way I'd explain it to a friend.

Summerland sits right outside Montecito's edge, and it is very, very small, and so charming it almost doesn't seem fair. Nearly every home gets a massive ocean view, because the whole town is built on a hill facing the water. The main drag has gone quietly high-end, with shops and dining moving in and Field + Fort as the new centerpiece, while the Nugget still holds down the old-time beach-town feeling from the years when everyone just drove through. Antique hunting on Lillie Avenue remains the town sport. It's a place with real culture packed into a few blocks, views that never get old, and cottages that ask less upkeep than an estate.

How it got this way.

No neighborhood in the county has a stranger origin story. Summerland was founded in the late 1880s by H.L. Williams as a Spiritualist colony: tiny lots sold for twenty-five dollars apiece to believers, a temple hosted seances, and the rest of Santa Barbara called the place Spookville. Then in 1894 a well dug for natural gas struck oil instead, and Summerland's beach sprouted the world's first offshore oil piers. The temple came down when the 101 went through in the fifties; the Big Yellow House, Williams's old residence, is still said to be haunted, and locals mostly like it that way. A town founded to talk to the departed, briefly an oil field, now one of the coast's prettiest addresses: Summerland has always been more interesting than its size.

The honest part.

The hill that gives everyone a view also makes the streets steep, and it's less walkable than you'd assume until you learn the local trick: a staircase runs down the middle of everything, so you can drop from the top of town straight into the shops without walking the hills. The bigger trade is the freeway: Summerland sits right on the 101, and depending on the property, the noise is real and worth listening for at different times of day before you commit. It's a small town's small tradeoffs, for one of the biggest views on the coast.