Ask a stranger about Franceschi Park and you'll likely hear about the ruin. Online reviews describe a "deteriorating" mansion, boarded windows, a place that feels abandoned even as the view stays spectacular. Visitors who stumble onto Mission Ridge Road tend to leave with the same reaction: someone should really fix this house.
Ask the people who actually live on the hill, and you get a different answer entirely. When the City of Santa Barbara asked Riviera neighbors and park regulars what they wanted from the site, the house barely factored in. The numbers came back lopsided, and the city has spent the past two years designing around that verdict rather than the sentimental one.
What the Survey Actually Found
The city's outreach for what it now calls the Reimagining Franceschi House project ran through two rounds of community input, an in-person workshop, and roughly 1,300 combined survey responses. The results were not close. Ninety-one percent of respondents said they visit the park for the views, not the building. When asked to rank the site elements they valued most, terraces came in at 62 percent and stone retaining walls at 55 percent. The medallions and stained glass windows that decorate the old house, the features a stranger would assume are the whole point, landed at 46 percent. Views scored 84 percent as the most important design consideration, horticultural legacy came in at 73 percent.
Read against each other, those numbers describe a neighborhood that has already made its choice. The Riviera doesn't want a restored mansion. It wants the overlook the mansion happens to be sitting on.
That preference isn't new sentiment dressed up in a survey. The city council voted unanimously back in 2018 to replace the house with an open-air space, a decision the Pearl Chase Society itself supported after decades of trying to save the building. What changed by January 2026 wasn't the direction, it was the design finally showing up in public for comment.
The Case for Letting It Go
Historic Landmarks Commissioner Robert Ooley made the argument most directly after the January 14 hearing. Much of the public debate has fixated on the building, he said, but the house in its current form was largely a later remodel, not Franceschi's original work. The botanist's actual legacy, in Ooley's view, lives in the landscape he planted, not the Italianate villa a subsequent owner built around it.
"We should not expect that the plants that are in the park now, the ones Franceschi planted, will last forever, because they won't."
Ooley's point was about maintenance as much as history. Preserving Franceschi's vision, he argued, means replacing plant material as it ages out, the same logic the city is now applying to the house itself. A structure that has needed rescuing since a 1971 master plan first called for its demolition, that saw a restoration attempt begin with a Pearl Chase Society grant agreement in 2001, stall by 2010, and get abandoned by 2015 for lack of funding, isn't being preserved so much as re-litigated every decade. Full restoration money has never materialized across three separate rescue attempts spanning more than fifty years.
What's Actually on the Table
The design that went before the commission in January proposes removing the house within its existing footprint and replacing it with an accessible path of travel, a new ADA parking space, an enlarged view perch and seating area, minor accessibility upgrades to the restrooms, and new retaining walls and paving. Seven existing trees would come out, replaced by seventeen new ones, a swap the Parks and Recreation Commission has already signed off on separately from the house question.
Not everything is settled. The 85 plaster medallions that Alden Freeman added when he remodeled the house in the 1920s, honoring figures from Benjamin Franklin to Emily Dickinson, don't fit the new design in full. Architect Kevin Dumain told the commission there isn't room for all of them, and the current plan calls for educational plaques about Franceschi and Freeman rather than displaying every medallion on site. Commissioner Dennis Doordan pushed back on that point at the hearing, encouraging staff to find a way to preserve more of them. Cheri Rae, a Pearl Chase Society board member, asked that the house's interior features, its stained glass windows, fireplace, and woodwork, be documented or made available for reuse elsewhere if they can't stay on the property.
Commission Chair Anthony Grumbine summed up where the panel landed: the building isn't salvageable, but the opportunity is to make the park better while still telling the story.
The commission voted unanimously to continue the item, meaning nothing was approved on the spot. The $950,000 in city capital funds behind the current phase covers design work and environmental review only. No construction money has been allocated, and city staff describe the path ahead as a multi-year process that still needs an environmental review before anything gets built.
| Already decided | Still open |
|---|---|
| House will be deconstructed, per 2018 council vote | Which medallions, if any, get displayed on site |
| Seven trees removed, seventeen planted | Construction funding and timeline |
| Design favors terraces and view perch over house preservation | Fate of interior features (stained glass, fireplace, woodwork) |
The Rest of the Hill This Year
The park redesign is the biggest civic story on the Riviera this year, but it isn't the only place the neighborhood has been actively shaping its own character rather than waiting on someone else to do it.
Down the hill from Franceschi Park, the SBIFF-owned Riviera Theatre keeps a quieter institution running: "After Hours," a weekend series of late-night classic and cult screenings the nonprofit has kept going since debuting the program in 2024. It's a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that only works because the Riviera has enough people who will show up for a movie they've already seen.
And this past February, Southern California Edison brought helicopters into the neighborhood for a day, installing five new utility poles as part of an ongoing grid-modernization and wildfire-hardening effort in the area north and south of Alameda Padre Serra. Residents in the immediate work zone were asked to clear their homes during the flights. It's the unglamorous infrastructure version of the same instinct behind the park vote: a neighborhood making deliberate, sometimes disruptive choices about what it needs to hold onto and what it's willing to let change.
That's the thread running through all of it. The Riviera isn't a place where change happens to people, it's one where the people who live there have been asked, repeatedly and specifically, what they want, and have answered with numbers that don't leave much room for outside assumptions. The next time someone tells you the house at Franceschi Park is a shame, you'll know the neighborhood settled that argument years before the cameras and reviews caught up.
If you're already living the Riviera's daily rhythm, from the view perch to the theater seats, and questions ever come up about your own place on the hill, Tiffany Charbonneau is always glad to talk. Let's Connect.
