Modjeska Canyon’s artistic homes will be featured on a tour Sunday

If you have never been to the magical Modjeska Canyon, you are hereby invited.

Set your newspaper or laptop down and pull on your cowboy boots, or at least some sturdy sandals.

Then get in your car and drive down Santiago Canyon Road; keep on going, until the trees far outnumber the homes and the road twists and narrows and you get the urge to roll down your windows.

When you hit Modjeska Canyon Road, stop. Shuttles will be there to ferry you a couple miles deeper into the canyon. And now you will feel like you are no longer in Orange County, or even Southern California.

Here wild turkeys criss-cross the roads and cabins are draped in vines. You’ll pass cottages with weather-worn wooden porches, a Swiss chalet with red flower window boxes, giant cactus sprouting from the ground, beat up pick-up trucks, big old shady trees with gnarled trunks and horses posing behind split-rail fences, just waiting for an artist to come along and paint them.

There are 215 houses in the canyon, filled with hippies and horseback riders and creative types and retired coastal expats with lots of money. On Sunday, May 6, seven of them will open their front doors and let you peek inside.

Greg Killingsworth is one of the seven. He organized the tour to benefit the Modjeska Ranch Rescue for abandoned canyon animals. He is calling it the Amazing Home Tour. And it is not hyperbole.

“These aren’t just chi-chi homes in Laguna that someone paid an interior decorator a lot of money to do,” Killingsworth says.

They are architecturally interesting; unusual even. One of the homes, owned by Ester and Gil dos Santos, is round. Built in 1970, it has a midcentury modern vibe with a wood-burning stove reaching up to a circular wood-slat ceiling that could pass for a piece of art.

Killingsworth, who lives in the canyon with his wife, Nor, when they’re not on their power boat Paradise Found in Newport Beach, bought his place a decade ago. He calls it the Lost World. A former “creative guy” for Disneyland and corporate event producer, he brought in some giant metal dinosaur sculptures to roam the terraced property, which is guarded by ancient wooden gates from a temple in India.

A third house on the tour was built after the 2007 Santiago Fire. Jim and Diane Carter learned on a Tuesday that their landmark geodesic dome home, perched high atop Modjeska Canyon, had burned to the ground. That Friday they had their first meeting to rebuild.

“You just can’t cry about spilt milk,” Diane says.

The couple, owners of American Horse Products in San Juan Capistrano, never did think their dome home meshed with their equestrian style. Jim had long pined for a house like the rustic Ponderosa Ranch on the old TV show “Bonanza.” So the couple hired canyon fire captain/architect Bruce Newell to design something in that vein, except all in stone, so it would never burn down again.

The entire ground floor is like one extra-great great room with a piano, library, bar, sofas and kitchen. Two entire walls are made up of multiple floor-to-ceiling glass doors, which slide open to outdoor decks — and unfettered views of the sun moving up and down the canyon ridges.

The three-story spread, nicknamed the Carterosa, even has a stone lookout tower for the canyon’s volunteer firefighters to use whenever they want. An elevator takes them up there so they don’t have to tromp through the home.

Outside, a stable of llamas tip-toe up and down the steep slopes surrounding the house, munching the brush before it becomes fire fuel when the winds turn hot and dry in autumn.

There is one other house on the tour that was built after the Santiago Fire. Retirees Phil and Melody McWilliams were watching TV after evacuating their house when they saw it burning down.

“We cried,” Phil says. “And then we got over it in about 20 minutes. You have to keep going.”

Their house had been your basic house. Now fire wary, they decided to hire a monolithic dome builder from Texas. (They joke that they have switched places with the Carters.) Made of concrete, foam and rubber, their dome home — and smaller dome guest house — is impervious to flames.

From the outside, the clay-colored domes, set in the canyon brush, look futuristic, like something out of a “Star Trek” episode. But inside they are bright and warm — temperatures naturally hover around 70 — with teak floors and cathedral windows. A graceful stand-alone spiral wooden staircase takes guests to a billiards loft and outdoor deck.

“It’s been compared to a lot of things,” Phil says of his dome. “An igloo, a tandoor oven.”

Also on the tour is a carefully restored 1907 Craftsman bungalow and a cozy little house made entirely of rock more than 100 years ago (Fun fact: The owner of the Rock House used to live in the Round House).

Although it’s not included on the tour, you’ll also be able to spy the original Modjeska Canyon home, built by Madame Helena Modjeska, a famous Shakespearean actress who came to California from Poland with her husband, Count Karol Bozenta Chlapowski. The couple hired acclaimed American architect Stanford White to design a large Victorian country house in a live oak grove on the banks of Santiago Creek, where they lived from 1888 to 1906.

The tour will be open from 1 to 4 p.m Sunday. Tickets cost $20 and can be purchased on the day at the community center. Kids are admitted free. Don’t forget your camera.

For more information, call (310) 995-0976.

Lori Basheda is a contributor to Times Community News.