What’s Up at the Miramar Beach Resort?

Next Wednesday at 9 am on October 9, 2024, the Rosewood Miramar Beach Resort and its charismatic owner, Rick Caruso, will meet with the Santa Barbara County Planning Commission (CPC), seeking approval for needed improvements to make their resort more attractive to its 5-star clientele and to the Montecito community. What will the CPC be looking for?

Workforce Housing for Employees

Employer-furnished housing, subsidized by the Miramar at far less than market rates, has the admirable benefits of keeping key members of its workforce on-site, reducing commuter traffic on the freeway, saving gas for the employees, curbing carbon pollution, and helping satisfy the required affordable housing quota assigned to unincorporated county areas like Montecito. No other private employer in Montecito has offered our community this benefit without upfront government subsidies.

The plan is to build 26 units of new workforce housing – seventeen studios, three 1-Bedroom and six 2-BR units – all built over the present surface parking at the lower end of S. Jameson Lane. 

There may be some griping that not all 26 units may be designated by the County as serving very-low and low-income professional thresholds – such as housekeepers. Taking supervisors and managers off long-commutes has an equal benefit to reducing traffic and having trained managers on-site for emergencies such as earthquake, fire, flood, or road closures is a good thing. 

This project should be applauded by neighbors and the community. It should be approved as submitted with an expression of gratitude to the resort for attempting to help solve our problem of providing employees with affordable housing on a voluntary basis.

Added Underground Parking

Underground parking is extremely expensive to build, especially after the resort has been open for five years. The good news is that new underground parking will add a net new 45 parking spaces to the resort’s current capacity. It is hard not to applaud additional covered parking spaces.

Guests and visitors are relieved of the onerous task of finding parking because every car pulling up to the Miramar, for guests who want to sleep, dine, shop, or walk the beach, must use valet parking. Valet parking can add 20% to parking capacity because car-keys are retained by valet personnel. Again, a no-brainer for approval.

The Addition of Eight Long-term Stay Units

Luxury resort owners have found a surprising number of international and domestic guests who are looking for long-term stays with immediate-access to 5-star resort services like heated pools, hairstyle and fitness salons, guestrooms for visiting family and friends, dining and takeout services for meals or entertaining, and the added safety of 24-hour on-site security.

The original county entitlement for the Miramar Beach Resort was 186 keys. Through the 12-year planning approval process, the number of guestrooms was voluntarily reduced by the Miramar to its current size of 119 rooms and 34 suites, for a total of 153 keys on 16 acres of prime, ocean-front real estate. That’s very low-density for a beachfront resort, and a shortfall of 33 keys below the original entitlements. The addition of eight highly desirable, long-term stay units with two or three bedrooms is no threat to the character of the resort, nor to the Montecito community.

The Addition of a Dozen Luxury Specialty Shops

Many of the world’s finest resorts, especially beachfront resorts, are adding quiet luxury specialty shops as a required 5-star amenity for guests and nearby neighbors seeking a relaxed personal experience. Luxury retail is undergoing a defining transformation in its efforts to attract a larger share of the highly desirable new millennials and Gen Z resort guests, ages 20 to 45 – the most coveted affluent shoppers.

Guests willing to pay several thousand dollars a night for a fantasy weekend or an anniversary offer a concentrated target market for high-end retailers. At the Miramar, new high-end spenders check in or out every day, bringing a continuous flow of ideal millennials and Gen Z target market customers every 24-hours.

Luxury retail shops have been fleeing Santa Barbara like rats on roller-skates. Saks and Nordstrom have shuttered on State Street; Tiffany and Luis Vuitton have closed at La Cumbre. They are being replaced by T-shirt shops and tourist traps. Digitally savvy, affluent millennials and Generation Z shoppers are seeking casualwear that offers an expression of freedom – a mixture of casual and playful designs. They want luxury accessories that add a unique personal statement.

Miramar guests have both the time and financial ability to pursue luxury products during their stay. In Rick Caruso, we have a world-class genius in reinventing high-end shopping experiences that combine quality products with convenience and personal service. Many residents of Montecito enjoy browsing specialty boutiques to keep abreast of new products and new trends. 

Opponents of the Miramar’s improvement plan have focused on the retail component as the weakest link in the Miramar proposed upgrades. They have falsely labeled the additional shops as: “A major shopping mall that will destroy the character of the Montecito neighborhood.” 

Take a closer look at the proposed retail additions. Miramar guests and local visitors will exit the 101, stop at the top of the on-ramp at Eucalyptus Lane, and proceed down the San Ysidro on-ramp to enter the Miramar Resort entrance to valet park. There will be no vehicle or pedestrian access from Eucalyptus Drive. That means no neighborhood visibility of shops, no retail sign visibility and no specialty shop parking. That is not my definition of a “shopping mall.” If opponents want to keep frightening people by calling this request a “shopping mall,” go ahead, but please stop distorting the truth.

Will the added shops destroy the character of the Montecito community, as opponents claim?

I find this a hard case to make. Montecito is a semi-rural, casually elegant village of unparalleled natural beauty. We try desperately to preserve our village character – small roads built for beauty, not for speed of traffic; exceptional schools; secluded homes hidden behind stone walls and hedges; and world-class resorts tucked between the mountains and the sea. We want to preserve Montecito as a place of natural beauty and charm, free from urban crime, high-density housing, homelessness, squalor and urban decay. The Miramar is an important part of this aura of “casual elegance.”

It is ironic that local neighbors who fought the hardest to block the Miramar have benefitted the most economically since the Miramar opened in February 2019. It is difficult to argue that the addition of a few luxury resort shops that can only be accessed through the existing entrance to the hotel, with no access to the neighboring community, will have a negative impact on nearby homes that have enjoyed 50 to 100% increases in neighborhood home values since the Miramar opened. The fact is that the neighborhood has become far more attractive and desirable as evidenced by the residential price increases.

Like most Montecito residents, I hope that Rick Caruso and his talented team are allowed, like any other good neighbor, to do whatever he thinks best for his 16 acre-site, so long as he meets zoning codes and does not violate his existing conditions of approval.

Concern Over Neighborhood Sightlines

The opposition group has expressed concern over the height of new shops and long-term-stay units. In response, the Caruso team has already cut their plan from three-stories to two and reduced the retail square footage by a third to placate neighbors.

Drive the neighborhood yourself. Park in the All Saints-by-the-Sea parking lot. The view from the parking lot is the only partial mountain view affected by the Miramar request. Not one single home along the beachfront, or Eucalyptus Lane, Miramar Lane, or Humphrey Road, or any other neighborhood street, will lose its mountain sightlines.

What’s Best for Montecito?

Most importantly for members of the Santa Barbara County Planning Commissioners, Rick Caruso deserves enormous credit for partnering with the Montecito community – listening to our concerns, modifying his plans, committing additional funding, and delivering a superb, community-based product. That is rare for an uber-wealthy businessman. That should count for something in obtaining his new approvals.

Long-time planning commissioners such as Laura M. Bridley and C. Michael Cooney who have fought so hard to preserve and improve such Montecito “crown jewels” as Lotusland and Casa del Herrero, should extend the same support to the Rosewood Miramar, which has transformed Miramar Beach, Hammond’s Beach and Butterfly Beach into a stroller’s beachfront paradise from Olive Mill/Channel Drive to San Ysidro/Eucalyptus Lane.

We need to treat Rick Caruso as a welcome neighbor. If we keep punishing him with hideously-expensive permitting processes and claims that are “as thin as the broth made from the shadow of a chicken” that somehow a few added shops will destroy the character of this community, he can become exhausted by the process and sell the Miramar to an offshore sheik or a Wall Street real estate private equity firm, whose mission is to maximize profits, cut employee costs and care less about this community. Wouldn’t that be a community tragedy?