Wandering Mountain Drive’s Wacky Hermitage

Ever since the naked grape-crushing and pioneering hot-tubbing days of the 1950s, Mountain Drive has been celebrated as Santa Barbara’s wackiest neighborhood. But it wasn’t until the early 1990s that the road’s most visibly bizarre resident moved to town and proceeded to build a brightly colored house perched above Parma Park and to erect countless crazy sculptures around his property for all to gawk at.

This is the tale of Theodore Roosevelt Gardner II, whose home—known simply as “The Hermitage”—was consumed by the Tea Fire in 2008, but whose wild artistic spirit and wildly spirited art continue on. Today, while most of the sculptures remain standing but scarred and his new home arises slowly from the ashes, Gardner’s legacy is best remembered in The Hermitage Santa Barbara at 20, a photography book laden with anecdotal memoirs that Allen A. Knoll Publishers released earlier this year.

“It’s not much, but it’s home,” Gardner tells me one morning in a subdued, ironic tone that persisted throughout our stroll around his 18-plus acres, a place where garden jockeys are buried like China’s terra-cotta warriors and the remnants of a crashed UFO abut citrus trees, rare cycads, and even a redwood grove. “We wanted to build a little retreat,” he said of buying the property 20 years ago, after having visited Santa Barbara from his Palos Verdes home for nearly four decades. “It was too cheap to be true, and then I discovered why.” The “why” was partly because of the property’s steep slopes, but also because of stringent city regulations and vigilant neighbors who objected to almost everything Gardner proposed. Was he too weird for Mountain Drive? “You’d be surprised,” said Gardner, whose home is most easily located by looking for the bent-over-bicyclist mailbox. “If you’re different than they are …”