In 2016, Gwyneth Paltrow didn't just buy a plot of land in Montecito. She bought it during one of the worst droughts in California's history. The California State Water Resources Control Board was still enforcing an emergency order that year, first issued in 2015, requiring cities throughout the state to reduce urban water use by 25 percent. The 2.4-acre lot, which came with two dilapidated homes built in the late 1980s, was purchased by Paltrow for $4.9 million, according to Architectural Digest and other property profiles of the estate. She tore them both down. What she built over the next six years was more than a celebrity mansion. It can be read as a case study in how some wealthy homeowners were building differently in a state that was running low on water.
Dream home built during a water crisis
The drought hit especially hard in Montecito, the seaside town adjacent to Santa Barbara. The district’s main reservoir, Lake Cachuma, was down to about 30 percent capacity, CBS News reported at the time, and some Montecito residents had their water allocations cut by as much as 90 percent, with fines for anyone who exceeded them. Constructing the 14,000-square-foot estate from the ground up in this setting, as House Digest reported, was no small feat. Every design decision, from irrigation to plumbing, had to serve a place where water could no longer be taken for granted.
