STRUCTURES : Sherwood Valley : A gated, architecturally guarded Shangri-La is under creation outside Westlake.

Up Sherwood Valley way, they’re building a little Shangri-La. Provided you’re in the proper tax bracket and have an eye for the proper aesthetics, you’re welcome to sign aboard.

Down the road, you find a bona fide lake (well, full of bona fide water) which, if you squint, seems like a mountain lake rather than an artificial body of water a few miles from the Ventura Freeway. Further along in the valley, there is the mother of all golf courses: It’s a golf course that won’t quit, and not for the fainthearted.

The brochure waxes poetic: “Here is a hidden valley as old as time, where nature and man’s careful plan combine to create an unparalleled haven for wildlife, mountain woodland and flowering plants.” It is also a haven for those who want a semblance of architectural purity and an almost generic sense of classicism on the block.

Once you’ve penetrated the looming gates of Sherwood Valley--the best security that money can buy--you enter a protected realm, which, if all goes according to plan, will one day be a stylistically homogenous affluent housing community.

No postmodernism will pass through these portals. No ironic architectural references filtering the past through the present will find a home here. It will be the kind of architecturally coherent aristocratic area you might find on the East Coast, where homes date from a century or more ago.

Here in Southern California, a century is a very long time ago. Antiquity is a luxury--and an illusion--that only money can buy.

This area’s legacy of elaborate artifice began long ago. The artificial Lake Sherwood, tucked discreetly into the valley outside Westlake, was so named after the 1922 version of “Robin Hood.” Douglas Fairbanks Sr. tooled around the area in tights here.

Subsequently, the lake dried up, only to be brought back to life in the mid 1980s, as developer-visionary and Forbes 400 regular David Murdock began forging his plans for Sherwood Valley. He recognized the potential for this prime chunk of real estate nestled in the Santa Monica mountains.

Unlike many other new developments cropping up in Ventura County and bearing the unmistakable mark of new vegetation, Sherwood Valley looks like a comfortable fixture. In part, the illusion was achieved through Murdock’s $6-million project to transplant ancient, stately oak trees.

In more ways than one, Sherwood Valley is in a carefully constructed time warp. Sales representative Diane Wilson commented: “It’s very different from what you usually find in Southern California. We want a timeless look, so that when someone comes back to visit in 200 years, they won’t be able to tell when the houses were built.”

So much for living in real space, real time. The Sherwood Valley development is intent on preserving a sense of arrested time, relying on all-American archetypes of what a mansion is and should look like.

In Sherwood Valley, too, golf is on the brain. Cheeky “Golf Cart Crossing” signs dot the winding roads.

Now two years old, the behemoth Sherwood Country Club is an undeniably impressive Georgian Colonial structure--”a Southern California sanctuary for the elite”--that spreads its brick-lined wings amid the green space. A $150,000 initiation fee will buy you a cup of coffee here.

Ronald Reagan, like George Bush, is an honorary member of the club, and reportedly once gazed longingly at the structure from the green, saying “that is the most elegant, beautiful, classy clubhouse of any country club I have ever seen.”

The golf course was designed by Jack Nicklaus; it is a wonder in itself, regardless of your interest in golf. In the arid, increasingly claustrophobic terrain of Southern California, we take great lawns--and their residues of repose--wherever we can find them. Golf courses and cemeteries never looked so good.

On this property, the huge, sprawling expanse of green winds its way through waterfalls and waterways and abuts several of the lot sites. The development’s prize lots enjoy the illusion of rolling green hills in their back yard, at least until the golf balls land in the hibachi.

At this formative stage in the development’s history, the most startling and surreal sight on the property is the succession of model houses. Where else can you see this many shining paradigms of affluent domiciles, all in a row? It’s a Mansion Mart.

Fastidiously rendered in several basic styles--Georgian Colonial, French Manor, English Manor and Greek Revival--the models are designed to offer potential residents here architectural archetypes from which to choose.

Clients are free to employ the development’s official architects or to use architects of their own. However, strict architectural review standards ensure that incoming architects adhere to established criteria. Traditionalism is the order of the property.

Recently, representative Sally Bellerue gave a reporter a tour inside a few of the homes, through room after finely decorated room. She’ll be doing more of same when Sherwood Valley holds an open house Oct. 3 and 4.

Spiral staircases abound. Faux marble, romantically dark libraries, expansive kitchens, abundant wood paneling, an English herringbone floor here, a subtle stained-glass window there . . . these are the touches confirming that you’re not in suburbia anymore. Tall windows look out onto elegant pools, gazebos, and, of course, the green hills that Jack Nicklaus built.

“I always marvel at how they made a home out of this house,” Bellerue commented in the midst of the Georgian Colonial model. With its dormer windows perched atop the house and green shutters on the sash windows against a stolid brick facade, the Georgian house oozes an American dream-house aura.

Then again, Sherwood Valley is something out of a dream. It’s a dream that many people have, about a safe haven where the architecture makes perfect sense, where stylistic gallantry is not dead, and golf is only a heartbeat away.