Have We Been Here Before?

A new book welcomes us back to Suzanne Rheinstein's perfect Montecito house, a case study in the California was meant to be.

You might call Suzanne Rheinstein’s Montecito retreat, designed in a very sure 1940s style with architecture firm Bories Shearron, the most exciting California house never built—until now. It feels as though it should have always been here, perhaps lived in by Carole Lombard and photographed by Margaret Bourke-White, but this ts an illusion. The reality ts this style is a lost art, and houses like this are very hard to make today.

The architecture picks up where architects like Wallace Neff left off— not Modernism, but an abstraction of regional hacienda stucco and tile roofs that somehow ends up being modern. There is great discipline but also great risk-taking look at those raking chimneys), with a thread of Georgia O’Keeffe’s New Mexico taste throughout. The result is enchanting, strict, stark, sensual, sculptural, and—most of all—surprising.

My first visit was a pilgrimage to what I knew would be a perfectly executed trifecta of architecture, decoration, and landscape. The garden, by Nancy Goslee Power, is a very important component of this story.) I left feeling I had seen that, and also something more: the work of a decorator exceeding everyone’s perception of her abilities. Suzanne always makes beautiful rooms, and she is known through her books and her own house in Hancock Park as the most gracious and sure-footed classical” decorator in the west, but the Montecito house is more than pretty. In its singular success at adding a chapter to a style very few people can conjure, it 1s important. It is OG.