I wish I’d had you all in my life before Tad and I started our hunt for a second home location—we would have made sure there was a great hospital nearby and an active handicraft culture with groups for knitting, painting, and the like. (And if you scroll down, I’ve included a collated list of all the prerequisites you suggested—saving the ideal weather, which no one agrees about—in case it’s helpful.)
In the spring of 2021, with our half-baked list and a slowly-subsiding global pandemic, we began our search.
Mask memories; the breathtaking Santa Barbara coastline.
Florida was briefly on the list. I’ve been going to Sarasota, where my mother now lives full-time, since I was a teenager. It checked the box for weather, but there was no squash, no hiking culture, and the best food was at my mom’s house. We thought about Miami, but worried that the rush to the city during the pandemic had likely inflated prices, and we weren’t convinced we’d find the right social group, as everyone we knew moving there was either an investor or a particular brand of tech person.
Santa Fe was too cold in the winter; Austin was too hot in the summer. New Orleans… Ok, I’m going to say it: I don’t love the food in New Orleans. Scottsdale, we’d heard, had a great squash community. So we went there on spring break. I said I wanted a dramatic landscape. Scottsdale sits among rusty desert outcroppings and sculptural cactuses. In addition to squash, there are hiking trails and golf courses. The old town has well-preserved 1920s architecture. There’s an airport nearby and lots of ranch houses, which Tad and I were beginning to realize we were both drawn to.
Cacti and children posing as cacti.
We found a real estate agent who took us around to look at homes for a day. We saw a number of attractive houses in tidy enclaves. The neighborhoods went on and on. There was a sense of repetition and vastness that I had difficulty wrapping my mind around—I live in a giant city packed with people but somehow the suburban sprawl juxtaposed against the extraordinarily pure red earth hills bothered me. We also noticed that a lot of homes had astro turf lawns instead of grass, which looked like an environmentally-conscious decision. The real estate agent confided that in the summer, it gets so hot that people water their fake lawns so the turf doesn’t burn their feet. I couldn’t get this image out of my head.
Scottsdale didn’t make the cut, but it helped us refine our ideal location. Dramatic physical features like mountains and ocean were gaining importance. We became more focused on a small community with an arts culture over a location with a college or university. A nearby airport was important for traveling to and from Brooklyn. As skiers, we also began to consider the benefits of being closer to the Rockies.
California came calling.
All arrows were pointing to southern California. When Tad and I first started talking about a second home, Los Angeles was at the top of our lists. We both have a fondness for L.A. I lived there for a couple of carefree months in my twenties, and Tad, who wrote The New Yorker’s Letter From California for two decades, has done loads of reporting there. We both have many friends in L.A., too. Yet the idea of laying down roots in another huge city didn’t feel like enough of a contrast to our Brooklyn life. We were looking to try on a new way of living, with a smaller community and a different culture, something that would widen our apertures.
We decided to do a road trip, visiting locales in the general L.A. region that we’d heard good things about: Laguna, Santa Barbara, and Solvang were easy picks.
Situated on a narrow strip of land between the ocean and hillsides, Laguna is one of many California ocean towns with houses that stack up on the hills like Jenga towers. The views are tough to beat but the town, with its tight artery road, felt like a space you want to pass through rather than mosey around. Santa Barbara, by contrast, slopes more gradually from the ocean, up and over a mountain ridge. There are flats and valleys and peaks and lots of different communities spread over many miles—nearly all of them with breathtaking views of the ocean and a line of oil rigs in the distance, whose lights simmer against the water at night. There was good food, a university, and even its own small airport, with a beautiful terminal that has a wooden beamed ceiling and a terracotta tile floor. But houses in Santa Barbara are expensive. We kept it on the list, and kept on our search.
We were smitten with Laguna’s shoreline.
Solvang, we quickly realized, was a bust. It is both a tourist attraction—for its half-timbered Danish architecture, which left us cold–and a wine-lovers’ destination. We like off-the-beaten-path places, and we drink beer.
A few years ago, one of my most stylish friends, James, called and told me he was moving to Ojai. “Do you know it?” he asked. “Yes,” I said as I Googled it, afraid to let him in on my lack of cool. James has a special room in his house for listening to music. He drives a vintage Citroën. He quotes Japanese philosophers. If he moved to Ojai, there had to be something special about it…...
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