Ask anyone who has built here and the conversation turns, sooner or later, to review. Santa Barbara examines architecture more carefully than almost any city in California — and that scrutiny is a large part of why Santa Barbara looks like Santa Barbara. For an owner approaching a first project, the process can feel opaque. It does not need to. Here is how it actually works, and how we carry projects through it.
Why Santa Barbara reviews design
The city's coherence is not an accident. After the 1925 earthquake, Santa Barbara chose a deliberate architectural identity and has stewarded it for a century since. Downtown, the El Pueblo Viejo district holds the historic core to its Spanish-Mediterranean character — white plaster walls, clay tile roofs, deep reveals, courtyards — and projects there are measured against that tradition with real rigor. Elsewhere in the city, review is less about a prescribed style and more about compatibility: scale, massing, materials, and how a building meets its street and its neighbors.
Who reviews what
Within the City of Santa Barbara, most projects that change what a building looks like from outside pass through design review, with the Architectural Board of Review (ABR) hearing the broad run of them and historic districts held to stricter character standards. The boards are advisory in some matters and decisive in others, but in every case their comments shape the drawings. Our Santa Barbara page covers the city context in more depth.
Cross into the unincorporated county and the cast changes. Montecito projects answer to Santa Barbara County and the Montecito Board of Architectural Review — MBAR — which weighs each proposal against the Montecito Community Plan's expectations for scale, character, and landscape. The values rhyme with the city's, but the standards, submittal requirements, and hearing rhythms are their own. We describe that path on our Montecito page.
The typical arc
Every project is particular, but the shape of the journey is consistent:
- Pre-application research. Before anything is drawn, we establish what the parcel allows: zoning, overlays, setbacks, height limits, hazard and coastal maps, and how similar projects nearby have fared. Surprises are cheapest here.
- Concept design. The scheme takes form with the review standards in mind from the first sketch — not as a constraint bolted on later, but as part of the site's character. A design conceived for its context enters the hearing room with far less to defend.
- Review hearings. The project is presented to the board, sometimes over multiple passes as it develops from concept toward final approval. Boards comment; drawings respond; the design is refined until it earns its approval.
- Construction documents. With design approval in hand, the project becomes a technical package — dimensioned drawings, structural and civil coordination, energy compliance — assembled for plan check.
- Building permit. City or county plan checkers review the documents against code, issue corrections, and, once satisfied, issue the permit that lets construction begin.
How we manage submittals and comments
We treat review as part of design rather than an obstacle after it. That means complete submittals the first time — boards respond well to packages that answer their questions before they are asked. It means presenting the design's reasoning plainly: why this massing, this material, this response to the street. And when comments come back, it means responding in drawings as well as words, making revisions that satisfy the board's concern while protecting the ideas that make the project worth building. Both of us sit with every project through this arc — you can read more about how Moritz and Wade divide that work — and it is why we describe the practice in three words: design, plan, permit.
What it means for your timeline
The honest answer: discretionary review adds months, not weeks, and pretending otherwise serves no one. How many months depends on jurisdiction, district overlays, project scope, and how the hearings go. What an owner can control is preparation. Projects stall when they arrive misaligned with what a board can approve; they move when the research was done early and the design grew from it. The best schedule insurance we know of is a scheme the board can say yes to.
If you are planning a project in Santa Barbara or Montecito and want to understand what review will mean for your property, get in touch with the studio. Walking owners through this process is a core part of our work, and the earlier the conversation starts, the smoother the path tends to be.