Inside Montecito, Harry and Meghan’s super-rich home town

I am here because I have watched the trailer for Meghan’s Netflix show, With Love, Meghan, an eight-part lifestyle series (coming in March) revolving around the Sussexes’ gorgeous, sun-drenched life in Montecito. In it the duchess, glowing with honey skin and white teeth, promises to show us how baking, tablescaping and arranging flowers can be conducted “in the pursuit of joy”, making every moment magical, from sifting flour to eating lettuce.

Convinced by the jaunty soundtrack and how good Meghan looks, I decide to head to Montecito in search of such joy-filled moments for myself. I rent a convertible and take Route 101 up the coast.

They call the Santa Barbara coast the American Riviera, so I imagined I’d pull up somewhere as glamorous as the Croisette in Cannes. Instead, I arrive at an uninspiring collection of low beige bungalows housing a collection of Mom and Pop shops — a post office, a hardware store, a needlepoint shop. Surely Harry and Meghan didn’t move halfway across the world for this?

Then I spot the first sign things are not quite as apple pie as they seem — outside the hardware store, where a twee sign reads “No Place Like Home”, are parked a Tesla, Bentley and two Porsche Cayennes.

I venture into the Village Grocery and possibly find Meghan’s inspiration. Inside is like a mini Wholefoods — a strange combination of Hollywood money and a Haight-Ashbury hippy palate. Shelves are crammed with champagne hippy essentials: $130 (£105) bottles of Bollinger and $20 essential oils. On food shelves I find regenerative-sourced grass-fed bison, paleo cereal and Ashwagandha tea — whatever the Goop that is. I wonder what they have that a busy mother like Meghan might buy to feed her two small children. After searching a while, I find a packet of antibiotic-free chicken nuggets.

After my hellish drive, I fancy a snack. So I treat myself to a vegan, kosher, gluten-free, non-GMO certified beetroot juice and a 100 per cent organic vegan, gluten-free, palm oil-free, soy-free, low-sodium “chocolate bar”, which costs $10. I wonder how anyone has time to do anything here except read the labels.

Outside, I start meandering my way around the rest of the shops, past a health food store selling $100 turmeric pills, into a little boutique named Imagine. I’m humming the Beatles song — “Imagine no possessions…” — as I peruse shelves of $1,120 stretch lambskin leather trousers and $200 marble condiment bowls. Hanging on walls are canvas tarpaulins daubed with instagrammable quotes (one by royal wedding florist Constance Spry reads “Follow your star”, for $200). Nearby sits a book, the spine of which proclaims Be Fearful of Mediocrity. Are Montecito’s residents exhausted by all this motivation? Perhaps not, given that they are some of the most successful people in Hollywood.

• A Vanity Fair takedown — now what for Team Sussex?

Walking the aisles I pass Alessi steel kettles, books on Pride, rainbow chopsticks and baseball caps that say “Been there, hiked that”. I wonder exactly what kind of design-obsessed, nature-loving LGBT ally shops here? Then remember that Ellen DeGeneres used to live up the road. Until she moved to the Cotswolds, which attracts a similar demographic.

Leaving Imagine behind, I head off in search of Harry and Meghan’s other favourite spots, venturing down the road towards the village. En route, I pass a fake log cabin (with a homeware store inside selling rattan chairs for $3,000) with a plastic sheep outside and bulbous topiary so perfectly round and richly green that I stop to touch it to check if it’s plastic.

Rounding the corner, I find a collection of shops where the vibe is Totnes reimagined by Ralph Lauren. At outside tables people who look like Glastonbury transplants — but cleaner, richer and perma-tanned — sip coconut soy lattes and iced matcha green teas beside a noticeboard of handwritten adverts for integrative wellness workshops, animal acupressure and life transition coaches. One flyer for an “animal communicating” class, which promises to teach you to “talk with your pets”, is illustrated with a picture of a dolphin. Parking myself at a table, I eavesdrop on a group of thirtysomething locals, as one sighs, “Part of me wonders if I should just move to Bali for a year.” I squint closer to see if it’s Harry.

In the local shops, Meghan’s beige and white aesthetic abounds. I explore the Country House furniture store selling $800 stone chickens as garden decorations. Is this the price of joy these days? There’s an antiques shop where nothing looks old. I consider the $4,500 black Eames chair and white $650 LaGardo Tacket cookie jar, and a $3,800 “English library ladder” that recalls Vanity Fair magazine’s description of the Sussex home. “In the house’s 13 fireplaces, ‘mostly centuries-old examples brought over from France’, there was even some European history, stripped of any potentially uncomfortable context.”

At clothing store Wendy Foster, Meghan-alikes in oversized white cardigans and shin-grazing jeans sift through racks of exorbitantly priced rustic neutrals. I’m reminded of Dolly Parton’s old quip that it costs a lot to look this cheap, as I riffle through rough-hewn woollen jumpers, which look as if they were knitted by a 19th-century fishwife, for $800. Is this what Meghan means when she says she loves “taking something pretty ordinary and elevating it”?

The local estate agents seem to take a similar approach, describing mansions that can reach $63 million in terms such as “quaint”, “authentic” and “understated”. (In much the same way Harry and Meghan tend not to highlight that their $14 million mansion has 16 bathrooms — and instead focus on the beehives and chickens.)

Heading inside the Pierre Lafond Market café and deli, said to be a Sussex favourite, I find more rustic fare on a Harrods budget. There are wicker baskets, handpainted plates and wooden chopping boards — could this be where Meghan bought the black walnut ones that feature on her show and are said to cost £60? I spot a range of $19 LuLu Belle jam, “made in a home kitchen” in flavours that seem to have been inspired by Bob Geldof’s children: Ojai Pixie tangerine and Albion strawberry, cranberry and pomegranate. Could this be the inspiration for Meghan’s own American Riviera Orchard jam range?

‘Made with goodness’ or ‘packaged with love’

Onwards then, this time to the Montecito Country Mart, where I find a strange simulacrum of a small market town that looks about as much like a real market as Bicester Village. A cluster of identical pristine white shops sell products as overpriced as they are whimsical. There is the homeware store selling pottery plates adorned with smiling suns that look like a toddler drew them for $100, another with $70 wooden-handled dusters and a children’s boutique offering $73 striped pyjamas alongside other ski toile bedtime sets (so your kids can remember their holiday).

It is striking how aesthetically perfect everything is. Even the air wafts with the scent of Cire Trudon candles, which cost $150. (No wonder poor Meghan has resorted to making them.) Even the newsstand only sells stylish periodicals such as Vogue, Monocle and California Homes, as if the mere sight of newsprint might be too abrasive.

Everything is exorbitantly expensive. Even the plainest home shop I find, Hudson Grace, is flogging $1,000 silver champagne buckets.

I pop to Rori’s Artisanal Creamery (translation: the ice cream place), which Meghan frequents, presumably for the Tropical Wild Berry vegan ice cream, and watch people hidden behind sunglasses enjoy lunch at Bettina, where Meghan is said to be a regular. At pink tables with green and white parasols, they eat gluten-free, naturally leavened, 48-hour fermented organic flour dough pizzas, topped with handpulled mozzarella.

The same virtue-signalling feast continues in the nearby supermarket, where everywhere you look things are labelled with “made with goodness” or “packaged with love”, although it is all starting to feel about as genuine as DeGeneres’s “Be kind” catchphrase.

I head for the nearby Coast Village Road. Despite its rural nomenclature, this collection of dazzlingly white prefab buildings set on a four-lane highway feels about as much like a village as if someone asked Disney to redesign Milton Keynes. I pass Montecito’s famous electric bikes, which Harry has been spotted riding, which are dusty from languishing unused because everyone prefers to drive their Porsches.

The saccharine landslide continues, with shops called True Love Always (seriously) and Nurture Cottage, whose outside border is planted with cabbages.

On the main strip, I pass people who look so glowing and slim they might exist only on a diet of green juice (which is ideal because there’s a superfood juice bar on the high street). They wear one of thetwo uniforms of the wealthy elite, either a working Meghan palette of tasteful neutrals — beige jackets and white jeans — or an off-duty Meghan wardrobe of luxury athleisure. I hoped I might spot Meghan and Harry, but it is impossible to know if I’ve seen them because men with scruffy beards and Patagonia vests and women with long dark hair and low baseball caps are ubiquitous. People are almost indistinguishable. In my leopard-print cardigan from Primark, I feel unbearably crass. There are dogs here better dressed than me. I spot a chihuahua in a denim jacket and a bichon frisé in a knitted jumper. I see golden retrievers with a better quality of life than I have.

Like their owners, it seems they’re mostly vegan, with a local dog boutique selling superfood treats and plant-based rice-flour bones for $9.50. It is in Montecito that, Vanity Fair recently reported, when a labradoodle went up to a child and licked their ice cream, the child’s father, Scott Disick (Kourtney Kardashian’s ex), “ran up to the pet owner with concern; not because he was upset that the cone was ruined but to reassure the person that the ice cream was vegan and wouldn’t upset the dog’s stomach”.

For lunch, I thought I might head to Lucky’s, where Harry and Meghan go for date night, but I discover it can cost $175 for a steak. Instead, I decide to check out the Italian, Tre Lune, where Meghan had her 42nd birthday and Kevin Costner is said to be a regular. I find a place vaguely styled like an Italian restaurant with terracotta slate roof decked in vines, which feels about as authentic as Pizza Hut. Here mains, which include filet mignon and veal chop, cost up to $65. Even the Ellen salad, allegedly named after DeGeneres, will set you back $42.

Instead, I take myself along the road to Lilac with its oat milk lattes, gluten-free cupcakes and gender-neutral toilets, and treat myself to a £6 cappuccino. I flick through the village magazine perusing ads for private jets, oyster bars and diamond shops, reading a feature on whether Montecito needs “a Lambo tax”. Flipping the page, I am stunned to see a sheepish-looking Harry and beaming Meghan at the opening of a local envelope — sorry, bookshop.

Vanity Fair reports that locals call them the prince and “the starlet”, as if they cannot bear having someone live here who is so openly famous. Noting their penchant for self-promoting around town — in the video for DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi’s vow renewal; in Harry’s Netflix docuseries Polo, filmed in a local field; in With Love, Meghan, filmed at wedding venue Montecito Orchard — Vanity Fair reports that they have become “local villains”. An anonymous local is quoted as saying, “I think everyone, including the A-list celebs, would prefer that it [Montecito] is not on the map like it is.”

• Meghan used neighbour’s sprawling mansion to film Netflix show

“They attribute the increase in housing prices to them as much as DeGeneres and point to out-of-towners coming in, driving too fast and taking up all the street parking by local trails like the one Meghan was photographed hiking while Harry was in the UK for Charles’s coronation,” Vanity Fair reported, quoting one Montecitan as saying, “I still think they’re the most entitled, disingenuous people on the planet. They moved away from England to get away from the scrutiny of the press, and all they do is try to get in the press in the United States.”

I can see how chasing fame breaks the pact residents here have entered. Montecito, an immaculately wholesome Disney world, is where famous people go to pretend to be normal. It’s filled with billionaires with white picket fence ideals, living in gated communities.

I end my day on Butterfly beach, where Harry walks his labrador and welcomed in the new year by filming Meghan writing 2025 in the sand. For a moment I think I might have spotted them, but it’s another Instagram husband taking pictures of his wife in the sunset.

I feel sorry for Harry

Montecito reminds me of that South Park parody of the Sussexes in which Harry opens up Meghan, only to find that inside she’s hollow. Or as a person who works closely with the couple, who told Vanity Fair she “loves them”, admitted, “I have no idea what [Harry’s] interests are beyond polo. No clue what his inner life is like.” At least in the Hamptons they have a backbone of culture — Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller.

I find myself feeling sorry for Harry, who’s found himself living somewhere so bland. Imagine leaving a palace in vibrant central London for this beige mecca to wellness. As someone who spent my twenties chasing the young prince around Boujis — for work! — that was a lot more interesting than my day in Montecito. This might be the most boring place that I have ever been, and I live in a field in Somerset.

But it’s not just Montecito’s blandness that I find irritating, or even how disingenuous it seems — designed for rich people pretending they’re re-enacting The Good Life while their housekeepers do all the hard world. For all its Pride pencils, gender-neutral toilets and gluten-free cupcakes, there is glaring economic and racial inequality in Montecito that no one wants to address. Meghan’s show may feature Indian-American actress Mindy Kaling and Korean-American chef Roy Choi, but in Montecito I don’t see anyone who is not white, except those people waiting tables, working in gardens or running between the stores as Amazon delivery drivers. Don’t the right-on residents find this problematic? Or does living here take the same cognitive dissonance that allows a self-proclaimed feminist to launch a luxury trad-wife lifestyle brand during a cost of living crisis?

On the way home I drive past fields where I spot workers who’ve spent the day hunched in the sun doing the backbreaking farming that delivers all those organic salads to Montecito’s tables. I think of Meghan wafting around her garden with a basket, finding magic in picking berries. I leave Montecito feeling not joyful, nor nourished, but empty (and I don’t just mean my wallet).