Residents Find Lynn Ranch Island of Unbridled Freedom

Jacquie and Wes Wilson’s four horses can often be found wandering around their Lynn Ranch back yard, snuffling at fences, nibbling at plants and waiting for a few stray carrots to come their way.

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The Wilsons like to free the horses from the stable as often as possible, to mingle like friendly house pets with three dogs and a clutch of bandy chickens on their 1 1/4-acre parcel on Calle Arroyo.

The same freedom of movement also seems to be good for the humans who dwell in Lynn Ranch, a serene neighborhood just a stone’s throw from The Oaks mall.

“I was thinking the other day as I turned off the freeway that this is like living in horse Disneyland,” Jacquie Wilson said, stroking the long nose of her 10-year-old mare May. “There aren’t too many places anymore where you can go out your back gate and be on a bridle path.”

Bordered to the south by Hillcrest Drive and to the east by Lynn Road, Lynn Ranch is an unincorporated area of Ventura County, wrapped on all sides by Thousand Oaks. Which means that Lynn Ranch residents, including Thousand Oaks City Manager Grant Brimhall, can’t vote in city elections.

Some residents joke that they live on an island, free of the kind of building restrictions and rules that Thousand Oaks residents must endure.

Although there are some modest homes scattered throughout the neighborhood, residents tend to be fairly wealthy. When Lynn Ranch was carved up in the 1960s by its developers--the Janss family--the lots were made big, anywhere from three-quarters of an acre to three acres, with plenty of room for tennis courts, pools and paddocks.

A place with elbow room, that’s how longtime resident Marge Coddington describes Lynn Ranch.

She and her husband, Ken, moved to Southern California from Massachusetts nearly 30 years ago. Ken was taking a job at Upjohn Labs as an epidemiologist, but Marge wasn’t thrilled to be moving.

“I cried all the way from Cohasset to California,” Marge Coddington said. “Everything was so built-up and close together.”

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Looking for that elbow room she needed, Marge Coddington found her way to Lynn Ranch. She discovered a white house on Camino dos Rios that reminded her a little of New England and snapped it up the same day.

A movie producer named Harold Knox lived there, but was selling it--Coddington family legend goes--so that he could move to Italy and make cheaper movies. Knox had the distinction of having been married to Irene Ryan, the actress who played the incessantly irritable Granny on “Beverly Hillbillies.”

The Coddingtons converted his bar to bookshelves--”It was solid booze in there,” Ken Coddington said--and have lived, quite happily, in the home ever since.

“I’m a person that doesn’t like change,” Marge Coddington said. “And the physical aspect of Lynn Ranch hasn’t really changed at all since then.”

The physical aspect of Lynn Ranch has changed radically since the turn of the century, when it was a working cattle ranch run by the Hunt family. After the death of R.O. Hunt in 1918, it was sold to the Lynn family, according to the Ventura County Historical Society.

The Lynns ran sheep and cattle on their several hundred acres, farming the land until the late 1950s, when most of it was sold to the Janss family. Houses began springing up soon after that.

But Helen Lynn kept her house--a sprawling, hill-top adobe built by Cliff May, the Southern California architect credited with inventing the ranch house style--and about 33 acres of pasture land in the middle of the development. She lived there until her death in 1991.

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The house has changed hands twice since then, and the land surrounding it is now carved into 31 one-acre parcels. About half the parcels have already sprouted homes. They range in price from $399,000 to $500,000, according to real estate agent Barbara Patchis.

The new homes are pleasing to some residents, who picture their property values rising accordingly with the arrival of 31 pricey new homes. But for others, the sight of Helen Lynn’s pasture filled with cookie-cutter homes is tragic.

“Mrs. Lynn didn’t want to see anyone develop this land,” said Beverly Bisig, who has been the caretaker of the old Lynn Ranch for eight years. “She’d roll over in her grave right now.”

Bisig is busy restoring the ranch house for attorney Steve Mazin and his family. Having sat empty for two years, it needs some sprucing up, but is otherwise in solid condition, she said.

“It didn’t budge in the earthquake,” Bisig said proudly. “This house is going to come alive again. It’s been awful to see a house like this go downhill.”

Helen Lynn--who remarried after the death of her first husband, becoming Helen Kennon--loved to entertain, Bisig said. Architect May’s style was perfect for parties; everything is open, inside and outside. Porches run the length of both sides of the house, there is an art deco bar in the living room and fountains crop up in the most unexpected places, including one hallway.

May, who died in 1989, built hundreds of houses around Southern California, all along the same stylistic lines as those in Lynn Ranch, informal and well-integrated with the outdoors.

Less than half a mile from the May house is another Lynn Ranch architectural landmark, albeit a radically different one. Hidden discreetly behind a hedge is a two-bedroom home designed by Frank Gehry, the architect who helped make Venice and Santa Monica famous for funky, modern design.

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Built in 1988, the year Gehry won the commission to design the Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, the gray and beige house is all sharp angles, simple surfaces and vast windows. It spills across two acres of land, overlooking the Arroyo Conejo.

Unapologetically un-ranch-like, the house puzzles neighbors, who refer to it as “the cement house.”

“People have all sorts of reactions to it, and that’s one of them,” said its owner, an attorney who wanted to keep the location of the house private, fearful that architectural groupies will start popping up behind the hedge.

“Some people even thought it was a pump house,” he said.

Building outside of Thousand Oaks and its restrictive codes made it possible to use Gehry’s design, which called for a tower and a galvanized steel roof. The only architectural features of the house which could be called typical of the area are its stuccoed walls.

The Gehry house is typical of a late 1980s trend in Lynn Ranch, Wes Wilson said. Many of the original families who bought homes there raised their families, then retired to condominiums and smaller houses. The people who bought their properties were less interested in stables than in sprawling mansions.

“A lot of people buy the property just to put up a tennis court,” Wilson said disapprovingly. “They’re not horse people.”

“One person said, ‘I just don’t want all those flies,’ ” Jacquie Wilson said. “Well that’s why we have our chickens. They eat the fly larvae.”

The Wilsons met while he was a pilot for TWA and she was a flight attendant. They moved to Lynn Ranch about 19 years ago from Woodland Hills, after looking for a place big enough for horses.

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Part of the problem with some of the newcomers, according to the Wilsons, is their reluctance to maintain the open bridle path system that makes Lynn Ranch unique. It’s essentially a narrow trail, running through many back yards and looping around the whole neighborhood. The path provides both a nice place to ride and a highly social atmosphere, with riders stopping to chat along the way.

The Lynn Ranch Horseman’s Assn., of which the Wilsons are members, fights to make sure the trails are not closed off by new neighbors who prefer tennis to trotting.

“That’s one of our big battles in this area,” Wes Wilson said. “Keeping trails open.”

But lately the Wilsons have noticed a re-emergence of horse interest.

“A lot of kids want horses and this is where they can have them,” Jacquie Wilson said.

Although neighbors occasionally disagree on matters of horse trails and such, they wholeheartedly agree on maintaining their independence from Thousand Oaks. Lynn Ranch Homeowners President Dick Randall said an attempt to annex the 643 homes into the city in 1988 failed miserably.

He said he doesn’t miss having City Council representation.

“At times it’s a pleasure to not be concerned with it,” Randall said.

But residents of Lynn Ranch are not beyond storming City Hall when something ticks them off.

“Oh, they hear from us,” Marge Coddington said.

The construction of The Oaks mall in 1978 infuriated them, and they fought hard against it.

“I vowed I would only stop there to use the bathroom, but that’s it,” Marge Coddington said. “Those stores would fall apart if they were relying on me.”

And in 1992, a Spanish-style Circuit City next to their on-ramp sent Lynn Ranch residents back to City Hall. They brought petitions to council members and picketed the building when it was under construction, but to no avail.

But those skirmishes are rare, and for the most part, Lynn Ranchers happily go about their business with little interference from outsiders. They rely on their active Neighborhood Watch to keep crime to a minimum and on their horse trails to keep them united in their independence.

“We have our own rules, our own codes and the responsibility of enforcing county codes,” Randall said. “We’re kind of our own policemen here.”