Address: 1721 Gillespie Street
It’s heartening to meet two young people who are so in love with history that they celebrated their wedding reception at the Santa Barbara Historical Museum, dressed in fashions from the 1800s, and taught their guests how to waltz. Soon after this, the couple — Cameron Clark and Amy Steinfeld — bought this older fixer-upper on the Westside and began restoring it with history in mind. The home began as a simple one-story structure that faced south. The two-story portion was added later with a roofline that did not match the home’s style. The current owners remedied this. At one point, the home had been divided into apartments.
Clark and Steinfeld had heard that the home had been surrounded by orchards, but pampas grass was also cultivated in this area, judging by an article in the local paper in 1892: “If there are any people in this city who wish to see a really unusual and beautiful sight, we advise them to go out on Gillespie Street and see the beautiful field of pampas grass in full bloom.”