SO SOCAL: The Best...The Beautiful...And The Bizarre : FIXER-UPPER : This Way Old House
For the longest time now, the Masini Adobe in Montecito, which has the distinction of being probably the oldest two-story adobe in California and the model for the famed Monterey-style adobes popular in another, colder part of the state, has been in Gary Meyer’s family. Meyer remembers when his grandmother kept it in such perfect condition that you couldn’t tell that the 180-year-old mud-and-straw masterpiece had weathered a murder, floods and sundry earthquakes.
The Santa Barbara County Historic Landmarks Advisory Commission has given the historic property, not far from the iconic blue-roofed Miramar Hotel, landmark status. But history, especially when you own it, can be a burden, and after a long period of soul-searching, Meyer and his brother, Edward, have decided to sell the house. This has created one of the strangest realty phenomena in recent history. The Montecito housing market--if that’s what you call a neighborhood of multimillion-dollar mansions--is phenomenal as it is. Corporate CEOs and high-profile Hollywood are ferried by polite real estate agents past the Ivan Reitman estate, Geena Davis’ old property and the new purchase by a Yahoo! co-founder. Eventually, many end up on Meyer’s property, which, at $750,000, is a steal in a market where homes are selling for $10 million.
“They tend to walk around it once and then get back into their cars,” says Meyer. This reaction is funny because Montecito--with its faux Italian villas and ersatz Spanish estates--is a town earnestly re-creating architectural history. Meyer’s adobe house is the real thing, yet apparently it does not fill the house-and-garden fantasies of young professionals who have just made their fortunes on Internet IPOs.
“I haven’t had any takers,” Meyer was saying the other day during an impromptu tour. The house needs supporting timbers between the two stories, a new roof and plumbing and electrical work, all of which could cost about $200,000. “When buyers add that up,” he says, “then look at the freeway across the road, they drive out of here pretty quickly.”
In the meantime, the house is haphazardly maintained by Charles the Jeweler, who has been renting it for 18 years. Ideally Meyer would like to see the adobe bought by a nonprofit group that would appreciate its history. Right now, all that history is buried under the detritus of daily living, the easy chairs and stereo systems and posters on the walls. And that jumbo, 24-roll pack of pink Charmin toilet tissue slumped against one wall? That’s where the murder took place on Christmas Eve in 1881, when robbers killed reclusive owner Giovani B. Trabucco, apparently in a search for hidden gold.
No one knows if they ever found it.
