Ranch Dressing
A panoramic view of Melissa and Paul Kanarek’s five-acre Santa Ynez ranch. The prefab buildings designed by Hygge Supply are surrounded by a native landscape designed by Terremoto.
Melissa and Paul Kanarek’s fabulous prefab in Santa Ynez
Written by Lorie Dewhirst Porter | Photographs by Mellon Studio
When you see the words “Ranchy McRanch” in white neon script hovering above a hat rack made of antlers, you can take it as a literal sign that this is not your ordinary ranch. It’s a place where the animals have names like Tom Ford (a cow), Uma (a piglet), Arlo (a rescue horse), and Bart (a llama). None of these animals participate in “normal” ranch activities—they’re basically the most pampered pets imaginable. Except for Bart, whose job is to guard the goats and who recently fended off the deadly advances of a ravenous bobcat.
Welcome to the world of Melissa and Paul Kanarek, whose five-acre Santa Ynez Valley ranch also boasts a stunning prefabricated home, a sleek swimming pool fashioned from a shipping container, a boulder-bordered power circle, and a boatload of style. Paul, a bearded Brit with a biting wit, insists Melissa alone is responsible for their eye-popping environment: “Every creature, every tree, every plant, every stick of furniture is just part of her fecund imagination on glorious display,” he says with bemused pride. In truth, Melissa, a silver-haired self-described California girl is a true creative. The couple’s recent move to Ranchy McRanch—a name coined by Paul—was prompted when the two became empty nesters and grew restless with their life in Laguna Beach.
“And so we drove up [to Santa Ynez] for breakfast, and we were in escrow by lunch,” Paul remembers. “We didn’t really know what function it was going to have,” Melissa admits. “We just knew we wanted it.”
Their animal collection started about the same time. “We’re Noah’s Ark over here,” says Paul. “Before we even moved here, we had two crotchety, unrideable angry horses that hate us. Then we found out about these baby goats we could bottle feed, and they loved us. So then we have two goats and two horses, and then someone hears about it, and we get a third goat. And then we get goats four or five, and we stopped at goat nine. But we have a coyote den. And we hear there’s a thing called a ‘guard llama,’ which is a gelded male llama, so we put
it in with the goats.”
“We drove up [to Santa Ynez] for breakfast, and we were in escrow by lunch,” Paul remembers. “We didn’t really know what function it was going to have,” Melissa admits. “We just knew we wanted it.”
“But we didn’t know we were getting the George Clooney of the llama world,” adds Melissa. “He is so suave, so sophisticated. Nothing about his body or face makes sense,
but he pulls it off. Talk about style.”
As for the rest of the creatures, on a trip to Texas the couple fell in love with Scottish Highland mini cows (they have three). Melissa believes the two Kunekune piglets were always part of the plan, while Nova, the beautiful Doberman Pinscher, was adopted from a rapper who left on tour with Machine Gun Kelly. The total currently stands at two ducks, five dogs, two pigs, three cows, two horses, nine goats, and one llama. “What we’re really talking about,” Melissa says, only half seriously, “is the amount of poop we have to deal with.” (A tractor tiller has been ordered.)
Ultimately the pair decided to build a ranch—their style of ranch—on the land. “We wanted it to be eco, low carbon, and architecturally interesting,” says Melissa, “and fast.” A bit of internet sleuthing turned up Hygge Supply, a prefabricated home company whose minimalist design appealed to Melissa. After visiting the company’s headquarters in Michigan and staying in one of the homes, they were convinced.
“We were super busy, and I didn’t want to deal with decisions,” Melissa says. Paul jokes that “they actually take a lot of the decisions away from you. ‘Do you want black?’” But he concedes that, given Melissa’s exacting taste, the fact that “someone had gone inside her brain and plucked it out” was truly surprising.
“The company is fantastic,” says Melissa, noting that the homes are modular, “so you can connect them like Legos.” They settled on a one-bedroom module with a separate guest house, both clad in dark-stained cedar, and opted to add a shipping container swimming pool from Modpools. But the building process, originally estimated to take four months, dragged on for two years.
“It wasn’t mechanically difficult,” explains Paul, “it was just logistically hard. The workers would get Covid, and the whole schedule would go off.” In the meantime, the pandemic lockdown was in effect, so the pair moved to Africa for a month, during which time their Laguna Beach house was sold.
“By the time we got back from Africa,” says Melissa, “we had two days to pack.” And the status of the ranch house? “Not done” she says firmly.”
Define ‘done,’” Paul adds mischievously. They moved in anyway.
Evidence of the couple’s far-flung travels is a key part of the home’s understated yet undeniably chic interior. “I can look around our home, and every piece is a story that’s part of our life,” explains Paul. “The piece behind me we found in a warehouse in Tunisia, and there’s a fertility piece from Turkey. There’s pieces from Morocco, and the mirror outside is from a market in Nice.” Added to this eclectic mix is an elegant travertine dining table surrounded by chairs purchased from Ikea. “Only she could pull that off,” Paul says of his wife.
Outside, a glorious mix of native trees and shrubs surround the two main buildings, which are linked by a power circle comprised of five large boulders, all planned and designed by Terremoto, an adventurous landscape architecture design studio that Melissa discovered online: “I said, ‘Here’s a bunch of dirt. Make it cool.’”
But according to Paul, “Terremoto doesn’t take many jobs. It’s sort of like getting the best-looking person at school to take you to the prom. I have no idea how [Melissa] pulled it off, but she did.”
In reality, Melissa has always tinkered with her surroundings. Growing up in Orange County, her habit of constantly rearranging her bedroom ultimately morphed into a life in the design world. She studied traditional upholstery in London, ran a furniture factory in Downtown L.A., and owned the now-shuttered Brass Tack in Laguna Beach, which was originally intended as an upholstery studio but turned into a boutique. She married Paul in 2014, and the two became stepparents to each other’s children—Melissa’s daughter, Macy, and son, Cricket, and Paul’s son, Jordan.
As for Paul, he was raised in London before moving stateside, where “my parents were able to find the only all-boys school in the area,” now the coed Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles. He subsequently attended UCLA. “Going from a single-sex school to a coed school led to a scintillating 0.86 GPA,” he says with a wry smile. But a chance encounter with the founder of the Princeton Review, a tutoring and college-admission test-services company, led to Paul’s opening its West Coast office, where Paul worked for 30 years before purchasing Collegewise, a college-counseling business.
The Kanareks survey their property from the edge of their swimming pool made from a repurposed shipping container.
As if they didn’t have enough to occupy themselves, Melissa just opened her Brass Tack boutique in Santa Ynez, which carries hard-to-find brands like KYUCA bags, B Sides Jeans, and Mexicana boots. Still to come is her “Born in the Barn” collection of dead-stock urban-cowgirl apparel. Paul’s next adventure, what he calls his “final tilt at the professional windmill,” is teaching social studies at a local high school. With the Kanareks, anything is possible. Stay tuned.
