Our snowbird homeowner describes it as the yin and the yang. Last night the they left their Santa Ynez Valley home to the hoots of great horned owls and one final look at twilight descending on the Los Padres Mountains. Today they woke up to boats on the waterfront and the buzz of a Vancouver morning outside their Coal Harbour condo.

“It’s two kinds of life,” says the wife, who with her husband, bought their Southern California property 10 years ago. “It just really meshes.” Canadian friends first introduced the couple to the valley, northwest of Santa Barbara wine country. So convinced were they that they would fall in love with the landscape, they brought along a real estate agent. “We thought, ‘Oh, my God. What are we going to do?’” recalls the wife, laughing. “But the agent came, showed us the valley and drove us up to this place. We were sold.”
It’s easy to fall for this property, perched on a hilltop, amid the sway of pepper trees, oaks, olives and eucalyptus. Their land spans 20 remote acres just outside Los Olivos, a tiny wine-tasting town. The area’s microclimate—hot days and cool, foggy nights—produces some of the finest California chardonnay.

After the husband’s retirement five years ago, they set about renovating the property’s original wooden A-frame house. On a tip from their daughter, they engaged the services of Santa Barbara-area architects Ferguson-Ettinger, rather than bringing in a Canadian firm. “It takes forever to get the permits otherwise,” notes the wife.

The result was a proposed 4,000-square-foot design. The couple loved everything about it but its size. “The big house would have been fine if we lived there full time,” she says. “But not for recreation.” Today, the main building is a 1,200-square-foot plan with just the basics: bedroom, living and dining rooms, a kitchen and bath. Open and bright, the home’s windows frame views of the landscape and hills beyond. Additionally, they had the detached garage/barn remodelled into two separate, self-contained living spaces for guests.

The buildings’ adobe and corrugated steel frontage—a modernist take on rural Southern California architecture—carries throughout the three-structure compound. An adobe wall marks the perimeter of the two-acre landscaped garden and lawn, their one concession to Canadian residential design. The remaining 18 acres of semi-arid grassland are kept trim and fire-resistant by the friendly neighbourhood cattle.

This is farmland, after all, a place where folks turn in early and tractors rumble into the fields with the sunrise. The husband describes it as “back to the 1950s.” It’s not your typical sun destination or recreational property location. In fact, the couple used to have a place in Hawaii, “and it was wonderful when the kids were younger,” she says. But the long flights became cumbersome and, eventually, the crowds and traffic made their “escape” place feel a little too much like downtown Vancouver. Now, they simply jet down for a week on a three-hour flight to Santa Barbara. They shop daily for fresh, local produce at the markets in Los Olivos. They work in the garden and share plants with the neighbours. They swim in the pool by day and curl up in an outdoor living room by night. They entertain friends and gaze at the pinkened hills at sunset. Glasses of wine in hand, they search out the planets through a telescope, then fall asleep to a stony quiet, broken only by the hoot of owls.

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