July 31, 2025|by Erik Torkells
••• A look at Our Cosmic Coast, “the newly opened permanent Space Sciences exhibit at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.” —Noozhawk
••• Renowned interior designer John Saladino died on Saturday. The New York Times obituary is worth a read, and for a taste of his exquisite style, check out House & Garden‘s 2009 feature about his Montecito villa (which he subsequently sold and moved to Birnam Wood).
••• “Santa Barbara Debates Affordable Housing Mandate for Redeveloped Commercial Buildings […] Committee sends an ordinance to the council that requires including below-market-rate units in adaptive reuse projects.” If the city keeps insisting that every project have an affordable component, the result will be less new housing, which means prices stay high. —Noozhawk
••• Dirt.com turned to pablum when Robb Report bought it in 2023, so former staffers at the website launched North Hillcrest, which has some of the same who-bought-where info that Dirt was known for. (The posts are behind a Patreon paywall.) Anyway, the site finally discovered that it was Kendall Jenner who paid $22.8 million an Ennisbrook property back in February. The property is a hot potato of the highest order. Here’s what I wrote when it traded: “Ennisbrook’s Rancho San Leandro hacienda—with an original adobe circa 1850 and a 2006 house—has sold several times in the last decade: Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi paid $7.196 million in 2017; Tinder founder Sean Rad paid $11 million in 2018; DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi bought it back for $14.314 million in 2021; and Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe and her husband Michael Herd paid $21 million in early 2023.”
••• “Anthem Chapel currently meets at Goleta Valley Junior High School, but it wants to build a two-story, 22,038-square-foot church at 6595 Covington Way, next to Christ Lutheran Church and the parking lot for Stow House. Opponents of the project say the proposed church is too big and would impact neighborhood traffic and safety.” —Noozhawk
••• “Once a common sight along local highways, most of the bright yellow emergency roadside call boxes in Santa Barbara County have been removed. […] Today, only 47 call boxes remain in service across the county. Most are located along Highway 101 near Gaviota and south of Buellton and Solvang, with others on Highway 154 and Highway 166 [….] These rural and remote stretches leave drivers with fewer options when they need help.” —Noozhawk
••• The tree of the month is the river she-oak, “an evergreen tree that can be considered a master (or a mistress?) of illusion. It has a pine-like appearance—but is not a pine at all. It isn’t even any type of conifer (a ‘gymnosperm’), which reproduces through seed cones and pollen cones. It is, in fact, a flowering plant (an ‘angiosperm)—and one of the very earliest to have evolved eons ago.” —Edhat (photo by David Gress courtesy Santa Barbara Beautiful)
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