Please view our Santa Barbara, California checklist at the end of the article...

The Santa Barbara coast, between the Santa Ynez Mountains to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south, dazzles with its year-round exotically colored flowers and verdant landscape. Influences from the native Chumash Indians, the subsequent Spanish settlers and today’s wealthy arrivals from Hollywood and the East Coast give it an aura all its own. After all, here’s where Fess Parker runs a winery, Oprah Winfrey bought an estate and Julia Child comes to recharge. Still, prices for fine artworks and antiques are more reasonable than in Los Angeles and the pace is decidedly more leisurely.

Summerland, just south of Santa Barbara and 90 miles north of Los Angeles, is a good place to start. This beach town with its New England–style clapboard buildings chooses to ignore the nearby U.S. 101 Freeway with its speeding traffic and concentrates instead on nearby Lillie Avenue. Along this one-mile stretch is the best antiquing in the area. Most pieces are from local estates, so there is a certain quirkiness to the offerings--a bit turn-of-the-century-European-tour meets today.One standout is Europa, 2345 Lillie Ave., owned by Patrick Aumont (the handsome son of actors Jean-Pierre Aumont and Marisa Pavan) and Carolina Avila-Pierpont. “We’re strongest in Western European baroque furniture and statuary from France and Italy,” says Aumont. His inviting Summerland adobe-style store opens to a patio with garden urns, a lion’s-head fountain and a pair of 1780 Swedish fire screens ($4200). Among the many treasures here are sleek 1940’s Italian Murano glass chandeliers, a Louis XIII walnut buffet deux corps from Navarre ($12,900) and contemporary paintings.

Montecito Antiques, 2560 Lillie, is an 8,000-square-foot blue building jam-packed with antiques and impressionist-style paintings. Owner Richard Holgate says he offers English, French and Russian antiques, and fine art as well as “the widest selection of the eccentric.”

At No. 2280, a towering gray building with a white picket fence welcomes visitors to Summerhill Antiques, another store reminiscent of an eccentric aunt’s attic. Specializing in French and Italian furniture and accessories, the shop offers items from a 19th-century crystal and bronze chandelier ($5,800) to an 1890’s Indo-European cabinet made from exotic woods ($38,000) to marble fireplace surrounds, gilded mirrors and silver cutlery.

Upstairs, Antico II specializes in French and English antiques and accessories. “We’re eclectic because I buy with my heart, not my pocketbook,” says owner Michel Jacquemetton. His heart’s desires are obvious by looking around the store, which contains 17th-century angels, an antique cannon and French country furniture. In a separate room, partner Tom Schmidt has photographs by J.W. Collinge, who in the early 20th century shot mainly in the Santa Barbara area.