Montecito, two hours up the coast from Los Angeles, is a small enclave tucked into Santa Barbara like a love letter into a pocket. The region’s mild Mediterranean climate makes you wonder why anyone lives anywhere else. Montecito has a long history of attracting people who were trying to escape whatever cold or unfriendly place they originated from: East Coast families seeking to loosen their ties, Midwestern families who yearned for the ocean, International jet setters who landed and forgot to leave. After the advent of Hollywood, movie stars came for the privacy and stayed for the quiet streets and backyard avocado orchards. All of these people understood, on some level, that Montecito embodied a specific California sprezzatura, a way of living that permeates everything from how we prepare food, to how we approach landscape, to how we dress our bodies and our houses.

The coastal California material culture centers around the unstudied — the look is loose, celebratory, impossibly sensual. The key ingredient has always been this element of unselfconsciousness, which sounds easy but is practice a rather difficult task. There’s an appreciation here for things that are joyfully imperfect. Unlike Los Angeles, just over the mountains, where obsessing in mirrors is a fact of life, the glamour of Montecito’s sprezzatura has always been rooted in not obsessing. One
looks outward instead of inward here, in living enthusiastically toward the glorious outdoors. Swimming in the Pacific even when it’s a frigid sixty degrees. Hiking in the mountains until your legs remember they have muscles. Picking avocados in the garden wearing your favorite Moroccan caftan. Bare feet on Saltillo tile floors that stay cool even in August. Hair that the sun bleaches into colors you couldn’t achieve in a salon if you tried.

The Natural Garden

The art of west coast sprezzatura reaches its full expression in the gardens here, which are allowed to take over without much water or intense manicuring. Given that California is perpetually drought-stricken (we’re always either in a drought or just coming out of one), a garden that isn’t thirsty is also low-maintenance, and a garden that demands less from its owner is a specific kind of local chic that can’t be bought, only cultivated (no pun intended).

A classic west coast garden with sprezzatura is not unlike an English walled garden’s interior — messy, wild, sexy, perhaps appearing unkempt to people who like their hedges shaped like animals. But here’s the thing: the bees buzz in a delightful frenzy around a wild patch of lavender in a way that outshines any meticulously-honed topiary. The bougainvillea doesn’t care that it’s spilling over the walls. The rosemary out front is the size of a small car. The succulents multiply like gossip.

If a west coast garden were a person, she’d be wearing Ray Ban sunglasses with sun-kissed bare feet, and be completely unperturbed by the absence of a coherent garden plan. She might read a book in the shade with a glass of sauvignon blanc, letting the jasmine and the honeysuckle fight it out for dominance.

Fashion That’s Not Trying Too Hard

If you grow up in coastal California, you are shaped by its soft and often predictable climate in the same way you’re shaped by your mother’s hands or your father’s voice. There’s this clammy fog in the morning that makes you reach for a sweater, and then by noon it burns off to unveil a blue, bright seventy-degree day like a major chord. Due to this predictable perfection and the general unbuttoned nature of the townspeople, most of the men I grew up respecting wore board shorts and flip flops most of the time. Even the Mayor, who you’d see at the farmer’s market on Saturdays looking like he was about to go surfing, which was probably the case. The women I admired — my mother and her bohemian friends — modeled a very California way of living. They often wore long narrow cotton dresses and big straw hats that cast shadows on their faces like a movie from the forties. Their west coast sprezzatura suggested they’d just rolled out of bed, run a comb through their hair, slipped into a cotton dress, and carried on with the day without a second thought.

Sartorially speaking, there are many genres of Montecito sprezzatura, but I have noticed of late a common thread running through all of them: an overall disinterest in looking trendy. There’s an insistence here on comfort in conjunction with style — if it doesn’t feel good on your skin (cotton, linen, hemp, silk) why are you wearing it? This is not a landscape in which to tolerate being uncomfortable. A certain tousled quality (post-swim hair, a fraying straw hat) is a common look that speaks to a daily life spent doing more sensual things — swimming, reading, sailing, making love, cooking, living — than other culture and climates might demand.