A man wearing a red gnome hat is painting the door to a new whimsical playhouse in this part of the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden. It’s one of three new nature-inspired Casitas, which won a design competition and are getting set to be unveiled to the public.
The gnome? He’s actually the designer of this playhouse, Matthew Caliguire.
"We wanted to make a gnome home and make it feel like a playhouse that a gnome or a family of gnomes would be living in as they inhabit this beautiful canyon," said Caliguire, who also works professionally in construction.
"And then we had the opportunity to bring in an educational component, which is the fire resiliency element," said Caliguire.
"So the fire-hardening building methods and we've got non-combustible siding, we'll have a metal roof with a gutter and a gutter guard. So these are like very basic, but they're also able to be seen, and touched, and felt here on this structure. Hopefully, there's an element of learning and education for the adults that pass through here, and they can see these things played out here on this house and think, 'oh maybe I need to make some upgrades on my home as well'".
A little further along the path, we discover the mother and son design team, Cody and Karen Westheimer, who are putting the finishing touches to their design. Inspired by the Goldilocks fairy tale, this is called Tres Osos Negros and features a set of handcrafted wooden bear beds and even a dining table with bowls, inside a cave-like structure guarded by the three bears.
"They're the three bears, and then we follow the story pretty closely in terms of the small, medium, and large, and the same with the furniture inside the cave, the bear's cave," explained Karen.
What are the bears made out of?
"Chicken wire base, sort of like one constructs a topiary, and then they're fronds from irises that are woven and glue gunned on, and they're painted with sort of a black stain that you would use on bark if you were coloring bark in your garden," she said.
The playhouses are part of a section of the Botanic Garden called the Backcountry.
"This was installed in 2022 as a way to address what is often referred to as nature deficit disorder. We're living in an age where young people and not-so-young people alike are spending more time on screens. We'd like to see them spending more in nature, and that's what the Backcountry's all about," said Scot Pipkin, the Garden’s Director of Education.
He says it’s a way to nurture a connection to California’s native ecology.
"We are an accredited living museum, so all of our plants represent different parts of California. So a visit to Santa Barbara Botanic Garden is essentially like a microcosm of the entire state, where you can go from the furthest northern redwood forests to the furthest southern Baja Island collections," said Pipkin.
There’s something for the whole family.
"We have several eddy-out areas that we refer to as sort of 'parent parking' where the idea is to encourage adults to sit and relax and let the kids go off and have an adventure, knowing that they're within earshot, and the whole idea is that the kids are the ones that take charge of the experience in this section. So it's a curated experience, but it's also wild enough that we can safely allow our kids to move freely in the space," said Pipkin.
The new casitas opens to the public on Friday, October 24, at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden.
