Perched on Santa Barbara's Riviera hillside above the city's red-tile roofline, a cluster of white clapboard cottages has drawn writers, diplomats, and Hollywood figures to this address since 1918. El Encanto — the name translates simply as the enchantment — was reimagined after a seven-year closure by Orient-Express Hotels, reopening in 2013 following a restoration overseen by interior designer Alexandra Champalimaud. Her brief was to recover the property's original California craftsman character while fitting it for contemporary expectations, threading 92 rooms and suites across ten acres of terraced gardens without disturbing the compound's deliberately residential scale. The herringbone brick motor court visible at the entrance, with its sandstone fountain and vine-draped porte-cochère, establishes a register that the main building — white-painted weatherboard, pitched shingle roof, multi-pane casements — sustains throughout. Champalimaud's interiors work through accumulation rather than declaration: wide-plank hardwood floors, woven lattice headboards, carved Spanish colonial armoires, and iron-and-glass nesting tables layered against cream walls with deep crown mouldings. Fireplaces anchored in white marble surrounds and French doors opening onto garden terraces give each room the atmosphere of a well-inherited house. The dining room's coffered ceiling and wraparound fenestration frame a panorama running from the Santa Ynez foothills to the Pacific, a curtain of amber late-afternoon light catching the rattan chairs and the cascading amber-glass pendant above the room's centre. The lap pool terrace, set into the hillside below mature eucalyptus, completes the picture — the ocean visible just beyond the treeline.

Formerly a Belmond property

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