The Sierra salon

Could it have been any more appealing than this? “Dahling, do go and have a little nap after your massage. And when you wake up, doesn’t matter when, come down and sit in the creek.”

I opened the screen door of the guest cabin and thought how right “Darling” sounds when it’s spoken with a posh English accent, but how charmingly discrepant that accent seemed out here in cowboy country. Except that Londoner and Angeleno Jenny Armit herself is right at home in this town called Three Rivers and wants everyone who visits her at her weekend house to feel right at home, too. And inevitably they do. They really do. Any number of them start looking to purchase their own property somewhere nearby in the southern Sierra, and more than a few of them are seeing it through.

I was still too mentally mushed up to think about Central California real estate. A local masseuse with inordinately powerful hands had set up her table in the sedating, dark gray cocoon of the library and gone to work on my uptight city muscles, just as she was about to do with Jenny’s three other house guests. Fresh white terrycloth robes were laid out for the four of us. I didn’t even pause to take mine off before falling down in a profound sleep under the mosquito net. That, too, happens to just about everyone who makes the three-hour drive from L.A. to this peaceful wonderment of a place -- that first-day, coma-like crash onto beds, sofas, chaises, hammocks, soft green grass.

Clean air, farm-fresh food, a classic babbling creek and a hostess who knows enough to create a kick-back country place made for plopping your feet on the furniture (groovy designer furniture, at that) and not moving an inch if you don’t want to. Which I didn’t for the rest of the day and on into early evening. I doubt that 4 1/2 hours qualifies as a nap in the lexicon of any language, and it probably would have lasted on into tomorrow had I not been roused by the shenanigans of Otis the dog and the arrival of friends from the local community stirring up dust and commotion.

Jenny is an interior designer with bedazzling international credentials who has been making a big splash in L.A. since she moved here four years ago, and whose keen color sense and style -- “decorative eclectic,” as she offhandedly referred to it when pressed -- I greatly appreciated. As soon as she invited me to the simple frame house in Three Rivers that I’d seen featured a while back in Elle Decor, I accepted, with curiosity and gratitude. I was intrigued not only with her decorative eclecticism but with this remote area of the state in the foothills of the mountains and on the edge of Sequoia National Park. How piquant that Jenny Armit, a sophisticated world traveler who grew up between Ireland and England, lived in an old palace in Spain, spent years going back and forth to Sri Lanka, designed interiors for lords and ladies (“but hip society, dahling, not the swag and chintz set,” she clarified) had chosen this rural backwater southeast of Fresno to build what she calls her “country house” seven years ago, before she had even moved to the States.

It all began with a man named Jeremy Railton. In the mid-’80s, Jeremy, a production designer and art director for film, TV and stage, drove up to see Sequoia park, looked around the area, and thought: ideal. He’d been searching for an affordable place to buy land and build a second home, and here, unexpectedly, was a landscape so beautiful he knew he needn’t search further. He promptly bought 10 acres. Jeremy and his close friend Anjelica Huston, whom he’d met at her mother’s house in London when she was 16 and he was just out of art school, had made a promise that one day they would own land together. And so, over the years, they have bought a total of 160 adjoining acres, with farmhouses in sight of each other.

Jenny, too, knew Anjelica and Jeremy from London. Because she was “the best of British,” as Jeremy describes her talents, he hired her to work with him at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, where he was designing the AT&T; Pavilion. And then when Jenny visited Anjelica at Three Rivers in spring seven years ago, the Sierra and Sequoia spell overcame her: She bought a small plot of land with two old cabins on it, without ever entering the cabins. “I fell in love with the location,” she said, and a good thing that was enough, because the main house was unlivable. “I mean, pieces of the ceiling would come off and two tons of stored acorns would fall through,” Jenny said.

Two and a half years ago, she built a new one, in keeping with the vernacular of the old house. And in and out of that house go a steady stream of visitors who, in their city lives, produce, direct, act, write, design, teach, paint, play music, practice medicine, and who, in their Three Rivers interlude, do nothing.

On this particular weekend, I caught a ride on a private plane that was piloted by an author and medical filmmaker, Dr. Vladimir Lange, and was kept free of monotony by an anesthesiologist, Dr. Amy Opfell, who handed me Veuve Clicquot in a plastic champagne glass. Fifty minutes later, we landed in a tiny town at a very tiny airstrip that had a diner where all the waitresses call you “Honey” and “Babe.” I liked this place already. At the house, Chloe King, a screenwriter, was just back from a walk, and Jenny moseyed about the kitchen preparing a lunch of smoked salmon, salad and heirloom tomatoes. With fake sincerity, I offered to help, and didn’t insist when “Jenny Armit, otherwise known as Staff, “ as she joked, said no. Instead, I lay down on a pink sofa and counted this latest blessing.

“I have lots of places to lie down,” Jenny later told me, unnecessarily, because I’d already lain in most of them. “I want people to feel instantly comfortable. So I have good mattresses, good sheets and big thick towels. But nothing fancy, really. I don’t want to worry about things breaking or getting stained. I’m sorry, it’s home. If someone is roaring with laughter and knocks over a red wine and it stains a chair, I’ll try to get it out, but if I can’t, I just look at the stain and remember them roaring with laughter.”

Jenny served dinner on her white IKEA plates at her long, peony-colored dining table to out-of-towners and locals, a mix that is typical of entertaining in Three Rivers, especially on holidays. Vince Andrus, the contractor who built Jenny’s house, was there with his wife, Maya Ricci, a nurse practitioner and environmentalist who advised Jenny on all the native flora she planted to conserve water. And so were Dagny Corcoran and her husband, John Grant, who came with bottles of Dillon Creek wine produced from their own vineyard an hour away near Springville.

A few weeks later, on Labor Day weekend, I was back in the southern Sierra for a lunch at Dagny and John’s ranch, this time driving up alone because I wanted to see more of the amazing mountains that reminded me of the high desert ranges of New Mexico.

“It’s bizarre,” Jenny told me. “It’s various things to various people. To Jeremy, it’s Africa. To me, when the snow is on the mountains, it’s like the low Andes in Chile, And sometimes it’s Scotland.”

“It’s Ireland in the spring,” John said, “full of wildflowers. All the hillsides that were dusty brown turn bright green.”

Except for a briefly aggravating patch near the Magic Mountain exit, there was no real traffic to contend with, yet another surprising pleasantry about this area of California. By the time I arrived, a small crowd had gathered in the screened house that Dagny admits she built “to look like a chicken coop. I didn’t want a fancy gazebo, just a place to sit down out of the sun.”

Jenny had come over with her weekend guests, who joined Dagny and John’s weekend guests for roast chicken and pasta at the huge round table that seated all 16 people -- David Richardson, an artist; Clark Stevens, a partner in the firm Roto Architects; Amy Sims, an architect with DMJM Rottet; Penny Hawks, a marketer at Herman Miller; Jim and Frances Pyles, both sculptors; Rocky Laverty, chief executive of Diedrich Coffee; Jill Laverty, a cultural anthropologist; Vidal Sassoon of the eponymous hair empire and his wife, Ronnie; Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, an arts writer who also freelances for The Times; David Philp, a musician and real estate broker; and Tallulah Armit, Jenny’s daughter and a 20-year-old student in England. And of course, Dagny, who runs a mail-order business, Art Catalogues, from the ranch, and John, who runs the ranch and is a water conservation expert affiliated with Sequoia Riverlands Trust.

But the most colorful characters in attendance, in a deranged sort of way, were the canine contingent -- the various Labs and lurchers and poodles that maneuvered for center stage with their flamboyant leaps into the 60-foot-long lap pool. It was pointless to try to seem interesting after those theatrics. Everyone headed off to their cars or their bunkhouse quarters.

I wandered down to the vineyard with John to look for bears. They were especially greedy with the grapes this summer, although they’re greedy most summers: They eat the equivalent of 25 cases a year. “The bear just comes waddling into the vineyard and sits on his bum,” Dagny said, “and scrapes the berries right into his mouth and leaves the stem. And then he has the nerve to leave a huge cabernet poop right on the path. His big purple calling card.” To run them off, they’ve tried Tabasco, human hair, soap, Clorox, urine, noisemakers and five little radios, and about the closest they’ve come is when they played opera and country-western. “I have a right to kill them,” said John, “but I never will. They were here before us.”

That evening, local-boy-made-good Roger Davenport, a neurologist from New York, stopped by for a steak dinner on the patio overlooking the pond and waterfall and lighted by a chandelier hanging from a pecan tree. Enough wine was served so that I played pool with David Richardson in the game room until 1 a.m., which did nothing to mar the splendor of waking the next morning to the sight of Dennison Peak in the background, 7,200 feet high.

I perfectly understood why Dagny would have made a lock-stock-and-barrel move from L.A. to this hidden region, however incongruous it might have seemed to her life up to that point. She is the granddaughter of the landowner Edwin Janss, who developed Westwood and donated the land to UCLA for its campus, and the daughter of Edwin Janss Jr., a collector of important contemporary art (Francis Bacon, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns) who developed Thousand Oaks. For 17 years, she had an art bookstore in West Hollywood until she decided to go rural. So she bought the 450-acre Battle Mountain Ranch, with its “typically Californian” 1892 board and batten house, barn and two bunkhouses.

And then one day she met John Grant, another scion of an old California family: His great-grandfather built the railroad from Albuquerque to Needles and his grandfather was a founder of the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange. Because his father wanted to go into agriculture, he moved the family to the Bakersfield area when John was just a child, and there John has stayed ever since.

“It’s cowboy and artist country,” said Dagny. “I wanted a simple life, a simple house. You come here and you figure out what are your needs and what are your wants. In L.A., everything is a need. You come up here, and if something isn’t available and you live without it, you begin to realize it’s really just a want. And friends I never had a chance to talk to in L.A. I finally get to know because we have the luxury of time together.”

My luxury of time was over. I started the drive back to L.A. late in the morning, taking it slowly and thinking about the cozy communal dinners, the conversations, the confessions, the revelations, the roar of laughter. About the bears, the bobcats, the great blue heron in the pond, the majestic mountain range, the cooling rocks of the creek. And about the way it felt so all-of-a-piece out here in the wilds, and of how the wilds felt like home -- or at least like home ought to feel, if you’re doing it right.

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Next week: A wilder side of Three Rivers, Jeremy Railton’s African-style farmhouse where ostriches, emus and peacocks roam.