The myth of Montecito
How a place becomes a brand.
I’m fairly bad at keeping up with the newsletters I subscribe to these days, as I’ve lately become terrified at the state of my personal inbox. But I do try to read Lauren Sherman’s Linesheet newsletter for Puck. In a recent edition, she described a trip to the Rosewood Miramar Hotel in Montecito, California. Noted evil billionaire Rick Caruso opened the hotel on Miramar Beach in 2019 after years of the former Miramar Hotel property sitting vacant, and the new hotel has already been host to the likes of Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker’s engagement and opened a Goop store on site.
I grew up a short walk from the Miramar, so I have a personal reaction to any mention of it. And so I can’t hide my bias when I say it disappointed me to hear Lauren describe the pre-Caruso Miramar property as “dank” and “decrepit.”
The statement is not wholly without cause: the Miramar property was more or less an empty lot between when the previous hotel closed in the early 2000s and Caruso opened the current iteration in 2019 under the Rosewood umbrella. But there was a time, specifically the ‘90s, when the Miramar Hotel was a perfectly serviceable beachside inn known for its blue roofs more than its luxury trappings. I have fond memories of family staying there and swimming in the kidney bean-shaped pool. I went to preschool down the street from the hotel, and one of my first memories is sitting in the car while my parents voted for Clinton’s reelection at the community center on that same block.
But times have changed, and in many ways the Caruso-ified Miramar is more befitting of Montecito’s current status. Montecito has always been a hoity-toity kind of place, but when I was growing up, most people didn’t know it by name unless they were from or had lived in SoCal. Some people knew Santa Barbara, the city just north of Montecio where I went to junior high and high school, but when I said where I grew up, mostly they just wanted to know if it was closer to San Francisco or Los Angeles.
I didn’t realize how much that had changed until I was at a press breakfast in 2022 in Manhattan and doing the usual “Where are you from?” greetings with a fellow journalist. When I said, “Santa Barbara” to my new acquaintance, he asked, “How close is that to Montecito?”
To me, Montecito functions more like a neighborhood of Santa Barbara, so I find it odd to hear it spoken of like it were its own city — imagine someone asking how close New York City is to Williamsburg. But officially speaking, Montecito is a census-designated place, that is, it’s unincorporated Santa Barbara County land. You might say it’s like a suburb that relies on municipal services from the city of Santa Barbara without contributing its share of taxes.1
There have been efforts to incorporate Montecito, but while it still has not become an official city unto itself, it has become something else entirely: it is now a brand.
You could attribute the explosion of Montecito into public consciousness with the arrival of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in town in 2020. I don’t begrudge them moving there — I would totally flee to Montecito too if I had to escape my royal cult family.2
But their move did spur a national fascination with the area that is out of scale with what you can actually find in Montecito. I’ve since read clickbait-y articles on what it’s “really like” in the wealthy enclave they call home (I think this article’s take is fairly accurate — it’s pretty, but kind of boring!) and a desire to spin anything in her orbit as Montecito-ified (the “Montecito-based eyewear brand” she wears that’s namechecked here is based in Summerland, a perfectly nice place, but not good enough to be namechecked by W apparently). LA Developer David Fishbein opened the shopping center “The Post” last December with “Montecito” as part of its signage, even though it is very distinctly not in Montecito. But opening a shopping center in Santa Barbara doesn’t get you an article in Vogue Business where you can namecheck Harry, Meghan, Oprah and Ariana Grande.
Markle tried to spin the public attention into a viable brand of her own when she launched “American Riviera Orchard” in 2024, a lifestyle brand with little more description than pot of jam with a gold crest and the ensigna, “Montecito.” She has since rebranded into the more generic name, “As Ever.” I believe it will still sell jam.
But the seeds of Montecito as a brand predated Meghan and Harry. The Los Angeles developer Jim Rosenfield purchased and rebranded the Vons shopping center on Coast Village Road as the “Montecito Country Mart” about a decade ago, in line with his existing “Malibu Country Mart” some 70 miles down south. His takeover has shifted its retailers increasingly upscale, at the expense of some longtime tenants.
Coast Village Road is one of the main commercial streets that serves Montecito, but, somewhat ironically, it is not technically part of Montecito at all as it is within Santa Barbara’s city limits. But you wouldn’t know that from the slew of Montecito merch that has appeared at the Montecito Country Mart alongside the fancy coffee and clothing stores (I miss Xanadu’s pastries from the old version of the shopping center, but the pizza place Bettina is a nice addition).
But even back in the ‘90s, there were parts of Montecito that did not live up to their glorified image. Lauren’s newsletter mentioned a curiosity with another bougie Montecito property: the Coral Casino, a private club located on Butterfly Beach and owned by our other local evil billionaire, Ty Warner of Beanie Babies fame. My sole experience inside the Coral Casino came when I was in the fourth grade and I made a friend whose family were members. Back then, the Coral Casino actually was coral pink, and I had never been inside despite living a stone’s throw away. When my new friend invited me to join her family one weekend I thought I was about to be treated to a lavish poolside excursion the likes of which I’d never seen. Hurrah!
Instead, we were made to swim laps and then given styrofoam cups of ice as a treat, and because I was their guest and afraid of not being invited back, I said nothing about how ludicrous that was. I joined them on only a few more visits, on the last of which my friend’s parents purchased us a banana smoothie. Maybe we’d finally swam enough laps to earn one, who can say. As an adult, I can see now this was perhaps some pro-ana behavior I was being indoctrinated into, but our friendship fizzled before I could really find out.
No one has invited me back to the Coral Casino since, which is now a boring shade of white. But the Miramar Hotel grounds are open to the public, so I sometimes walk around them when I’m town. The beach feels smaller but as beautiful as it ever was, but I haven’t been able to muster up enthusiasm for the current iteration of the hotel. Part of that is due to Rick Caruso himself, as I am suspicious of any billionaires and particularly those with political ambitions. The cartoon-level villainry that comes with being a billionaire came out in full force when hotel security shooed local beachgoers off of the sand in front of the property when the hotel first opened in 2019, despite the fact that California beaches are public by default.3
The security has softened, but the new Miramar’s other major crime remains: it’s kind of ugly. The hotel’s design is like a Disneyland-meets-generic-beach-town mashup that I personally find tacky and incongruous. Call me a red tiled-roof supremacist, but I find the Biltmore Hotel down at Butterfly Beach — if it ever comes back to life, as the Ty Warner-owned property hasn’t reopened since 2020 due to disputes with the employees and ongoing renovations — infinitely more charming.
The Miramar’s Disney-like-facade is enhanced by the fact that the slew of ultra-luxury stores that have opened up on the property, like Bottega Veneta and Loro Piana, look like the same ultra-luxury stores you might find in Portofino, or Monaco, or any other fancy vacation town. The hotel grounds feel almost like a high-end an airport, rather belonging to an actual place. It calls to mind a luxury version of Kyle Chayka’s definition of “airspace,” except with cashmere sweaters and LVMH backing in lieu of third-wave coffee and Airbnb.
You could look out at the Santa Ynez Mountains or the Pacific Ocean and remember where you are, but maybe the physicality doesn’t in fact matter. Like any piece of branding, the new Miramar’s version of Montecito exists in your imagination as much as in reality.
not all census-designated places are NIMBY wealth havens; Isla Vista, the census-designated place adjacent to UCSB and home to college kids and the debaucherous parties that come with them, was resolutely rejected from joining Goleta when the latter became a city.
I get a lot of people asking me if I see Harry and Meghan around, and the answer is no. But I have seen Billy Baldwin at the local Starbucks on numerous occasions.
This would be despicable to do to anyone, but it ups the cartoonish evilness when you learn one of the people they shooed off was Abe Powell, co-founder of the Bucket Brigade, a local group which worked to restore Montecito from the deadly January 2018 mudslides.