There is, of course, a darker side – the noir behind the sunshine. We want nature, we want dirt, trees, flowers.”
“If we want sidewalks, we can take the five-minute drive into Santa Barbara … But we don’t want sidewalks. TC Boyle, who probably qualifies as being on the shabbier end of Montecito’s 9,000 residents despite being a celebrated, bestselling author, wrote recently how he valued the proximity to nature and the “semi-rural ambience”. In 1928, Charlie Chaplin called Montecito the “cream of the coast” and gathered a group of investors to establish the Montecito Inn, the anchor around which the rest of the community sprang up. This stretch of the southern California coast attracts no lack of superlatives. Known as “Chateau at Riven Rock”, it is accessible only along a gated private driveway whose sign warns passersby to stay well away unless they have permission to pass.
The spread that local real-estate experts say the couple has bought includes nine bedrooms, 12 bathrooms, a guest house, a teahouse, a tennis court, a swimming pool and a custom-made climbing frame for the children. In those hills, you could be holed up in a $15m (£11.5m) mansion – as theirs is believed to be – for years on end and nobody but your servants would ever know. It came as no surprise to Montecitans, or to residents of its big-sister city next door, Santa Barbara, to learn this week that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been in their midst unnoticed for more than a month.
In short, it is a place where an errant blueblood can feel right at home – while at the same time being assured of the peace it appears he craves. In 1966, the crime writer Ross Macdonald observed that among Montecito’s “mock-rustic shops” residents “play at being simple villagers the way the courtiers of Versailles pretended to be peasants”. Prince Harry and Meghan in London in January.
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