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Four Seasons Resort The Biltmore Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, California, United States · Four Seasons · High Luxury
Reginald Johnson's 1927 Biltmore spreads Spanish Colonial Revival cottages, arcades, red-tile roofs, and Moorish courtyards across 22 acres on Butterfly Beach. California recognizes the Montecito retreat as a historic landmark, the only Four Seasons operating in a designated historic property, while the neighboring 1937 Coral Casino remains one of the coast's enduring social rooms.
- 209 rooms
- Opened 1927
- Neighborhood: Montecito
- Architect: Reginald Johnson
About Four Seasons Resort The Biltmore Santa Barbara
- California recognizes the 1927 Biltmore as a historic landmark, making it the only Four Seasons operating in a designated historic property.
- Reginald Johnson arranged the 22-acre Butterfly Beach estate as Spanish Colonial Revival cottages, arcades, red-tile roofs, and Moorish courtyards.
- The neighboring Coral Casino Beach and Cabana Club dates to 1937 and includes an Olympic-length saltwater pool.
History
The Biltmore Santa Barbara opened in 1927, and in the almost century since, the building has never been anything other than what Reginald Johnson designed it to be: a grand resort hotel on the California coast, draped in a Spanish Colonial Revival vocabulary that places it in dialogue with the mission churches and hacienda ranches from which the style drew its inspiration. Johnson, a Los Angeles-based architect who worked in multiple historical modes during the 1920s California building boom, produced here his most sustained achievement: a 22-acre oceanfront composition on Butterfly Beach in Montecito that organized guest cottages, arcaded walkways, red-tile roofs, and Moorish-tiled courtyards around the central main building with a confidence and coherence that subsequent renovations have never needed to significantly disturb.
The Montecito coastline the hotel occupies has its own deep history. The Chumash people inhabited the Santa Barbara Channel coast for thousands of years before Spanish missionaries established Mission Santa Barbara in 1786, and the landscape that became Montecito's exclusive residential enclave was shaped by those successive layers of indigenous, Spanish, and American settlement. The Los Angeles oil dynasties and Hollywood figures who built sprawling estates in Montecito beginning in the 1910s created the community's particular identity — private, wooded, and separated from Santa Barbara proper — and The Biltmore's 1927 opening made it the natural social center for that community.
Presidents, European royalty, and generations of Hollywood figures have stayed in the cottages that scatter through the gardens. The Coral Casino Beach and Cabana Club, the private members-only facility across the road, has been associated with The Biltmore since mid-century and continues to serve as both an amenity for hotel guests and a social institution for Montecito residents. The State of California formally recognized The Biltmore as a historical landmark, making it the only Four Seasons anywhere in the world operating within a designated historic property. Four Seasons assumed management and has guided multiple renovations that updated the service infrastructure while preserving Johnson's original spatial sequences — the shaded colonnades, the open-air loggias, the hand-painted ceiling of the Ty Lounge — that give the resort its irreplaceable character. The afternoon tea service in the Spanish Colonial living room, with its hand-painted ceilings, has become one of the most beloved rituals on the California Riviera.
The setting
Four Seasons Resort The Biltmore Santa Barbara anchors Channel Drive in Montecito, the exclusive enclave known as the American Riviera, where Chumash peoples first inhabited the shore before Los Angeles oil dynasties arrived with sprawling estates. Designed by architect Reginald Johnson in 1927, the resort's Spanish Colonial Revival and Moorish architecture set the standard for refined coastal living. Butterfly Beach, synonymous with celebrity sightings, is a ten-minute walk, while the adjacent Coral Casino Beach and Cabana Club, built in 1937, has long drawn Hollywood's elite. Situated within a proven enclave of landmark luxury properties along this coastline, the Biltmore has defined gracious California resort living for nearly a century.
Restaurants and bars
- Bella Vista — Restaurant · Californian
- Tydes — Restaurant · Italian
- Ty Lounge — Café · Spanish
Amenities
- 22-acre oceanfront historic resort on Butterfly Beach
- The Spa at The Biltmore — 10 treatment rooms including couple's suites
- Historic Coral Casino Beach and Cabana Club (1937) with Olympic-length saltwater pool
- Championship croquet lawns and two lighted tennis courts
- Private bungalows and cottages set among fig trees and sub-tropical gardens
Awards
- AAA Four Diamond (2025)
- AAA Five Diamond (2002)
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