You don’t expect the glowing-white elk skull mounted above the front door. With its 5-pointed rack stretching broadly toward the heavens, it’s a loud non sequitur for the uninitiated. I’m in the mountains above Santa Barbara, the impossibly picturesque seaside hamlet that is home to a trove of moody righthand pointbreaks and red-tiled rooftops. Outwardly affluent and internationally celebrated as “America’s Riviera,” Santa Barbara is not a place where dead-meat trophies typically get such prime real estate. In this particular neighborhood, however, one that reads more bohemian than Andalusian, and at this particular house, one that screams callused-hands and casual instead of gated and gilded, it makes perfect sense.
Just a tick past the half-century mark, Jeff Johnson is hitting his stride as a “professional.” A punk-rock-crazed skate rat forged in the suburban angst of San Francisco’s East Bay in the 1980s, Johnson has chartered a career trajectory that’s anything but ordinary. His arc from the landlocked, ho-hum realities of juvenile delinquency in Danville, California, to being one of the most well-known and respected names in the outdoor industry is the stuff of fairy tales.
Technically speaking, Johnson makes his living as a photographer, getting paid to travel the world with camera in-hand and tell stories in pixels, film, and the written word. But to pigeonhole him as just a camera jockey would be woefully inadequate. He is a self-realized artist with a mind for design, a soul for free-rambling fun, and a taste for minimalism. His world-class photography chops simply work to tie it all together.
Johnson moved to Hawaii after high school to feed an outdoor itch and, soon enough, found his place on the North Shore of Oahu. The regularfoot made a living in restaurants and then as a lifeguard and a flight attendant, but his life was made of adventure, both on shore and off. He fell in with the Malloy brothers, their friendship blurring the lines with brotherhood. He climbed, he surfed, he swam, he sailed, he body whomped, he chased fun any which way he could. He lived an existence not too far from what one might imagine Huck Finn would aspire to—had Twain’s most famous character been born by the beach rather than the banks of the Mississippi.
Johnson’s home-base hideouts during these formative years were equally inspired: an oceanfront bachelor pad in the now defunct V-Land apartments; the only mountainside home across from Chun’s Reef, with Rory Russell living in the farmhouse out back; a 3-story, cliffside home in Waimea Valley with views of The Bay’s boil; and a 10-year tenure in a 3-bedroom house he shared with the Malloys on the sand at Gas Chambers, within easy walking distance of Pipeline, Sunset, and Rocky Rights.
Of course, through it all, his camera was never out of reach. Though it would have been impossible to know at the time, hindsight makes it clear that even among the mess of full tilt adrenal-mongering and R-rated debauchery, Johnson was honing his craft and laying the foundation for becoming what he is today—a wide-eyed and always-interested street photographer turned loose in the great outdoors.
A gig with Patagonia and their freshly-minted surf division brought Johnson back to the mainland in 2004. He soon became the company’s first-ever staff photographer, a position he held for the next 12 years. The Great Recession of 2008 made homeownership possible for him for the first time, thanks to plummeting real estate prices, and by 2009 he found himself saddled with a mortgage and a home on “The Avenue” in Ventura. He met his wife-to-be in 2010, right around when Chris Malloy’s adventure documentary, 180° South, made Johnson a star both on-screen and behind the lens. “Things started happening pretty fast for me at that time,” he recalls during a dinner party at his home. “I can’t say I ever saw any of this coming.”
By 2011, Johnson and his wife Kara, a model-turned-fashion designer with a strong entrepreneurial streak, had moved up the coast and rented a place just a four-minute walk from a few of the more private and preferred waves in Montecito. “We had a great spot but I wasn’t stoked,” he says of the couples’ first Santa Barbara-area home. “I need a physical relationship with Mother Nature on a daily basis. It clears my mind for inspiration more than anything else. I can’t really function without it. But that wasn’t happening at the beach house. There was a good wave a block away but it didn’t break that often. Nothing breaks that often around here. As a surfer, looking at a flat ocean 70 percent of the year is the worst kind of tease. It would be easier looking at a desert. Plus, both Kara and I felt like a retired couple living there. We wanted something with a better connection to the outdoors. Something with a little grit to it.”
In December of 2017, with their daughter, Adler, having just turned 2, the Johnsons finally found what they were looking for. They’d been searching near and far for a place to root their little family, one that checked all the nature boxes but was also within their budget. The hunt had taken them from the eastern side of the Sierras to Colorado, Montana, Hawaii, and even his wife’s native New Zealand. However, when their real estate agent sent over pictures of a 40-year-old A-frame located on the outskirts of Los Padres National Forest in the mountains above Santa Barbara, they both sensed that fate had finally come calling—even if the price tag was beyond their means.
The place wasn’t even listed yet but already had two offers in from other prospective buyers. Undeterred, the Johnsons went to investigate. “It was a Sunday and we took the 30-minute drive up into the mountains to see it,” he says. “Twisting, curvy roads the whole way. The yard was so overgrown you could barely see the house, with its red cedar shingles and the most insane views imaginable. The place was all but abandoned. It needed a full gut and major remodel to be livable, but we knew it was for us. Right away, we looked at each other and said ‘This is it. Whatever we need to do, we’ll do it.’”
According to the seller, the Johnsons heartfelt letter and family photo that they attached to their offer sealed the deal. With no shortage of work needing to happen before they could move in, the couple split the division of labor. He got the outside and she got the inside. A close friend and architect, Anna Stewart, helped bring Kara’s design visions into reality, while Johnson, in a twist of localized serendipity that seems to run through much of his life both personally and professionally, found an old buddy from his Hawaii days to handle the construction side of things—a big wave charger from Cape Cod named Jeff Sullivan.
“It was classic,” says Johnson. “The last time I saw Jeff was out in the water at big and stormy Waimea. We are talking sometime in the late 1990s on a day that most people would want nothing to do with. Anyways, fast forward a couple decades, and I’m at a kid’s birthday party in Montecito and I randomly run into him again. Turns out he’s living in Santa Barbara now and raising a family here, too. He also happens to be one of the best woodworkers I’ve ever known. We were lucky to be able to hire him.”
Somewhere along the way, Johnson also discovered some legit boulders lurking in his overgrown front yard. Surf checks from the deck, ridgetop trail runs out the back, and climbing problems to solve out the front door certainly helped make the place feel like home long before the remodel was done. Once inside, thanks largely to the renovation, the kitsch and woodsy atmosphere of the A-frame’s exterior gives way to a markedly more modern feel—white tongue and groove paneling on the walls, clear pine detailing on the central staircase and the lofted master bedroom. An open-floor kitchen and living space, white tiles, a white Caesarstone slab island, floating walnut shelves, a big farm sink, a slick-black fireplace, and the occasional, perfectly-placed potted plant all work to create a more fun and livable version of something that you might find in the pages of Kinfolk.
The artwork on the walls is sparse but spectacular, a mix of Johnson’s work, the work of friends, and the occasional artifact from a life less ordinary. Original R. Crumb drawings, a custom surf fin inked up by Shawn Stüssy, a hazy beach scene by Will Adler, an antique ice axe, and stacks of art books and odd-shaped rock climbing cams hang alongside hand-woven Fijian baskets. The entire place is also bathed in the type of natural light that is only found when living at least a few thousand feet above sea level.
The real charm, however, is the view. It’s never not with you when you’re on the property. Even when it’s blocked from vision by trees or other obstructions, the bigness of its presence is felt in the back of your brain. The undulating azure of the Pacific dominates the horizon from south to west to north. It invites both quiet contemplation and constant calculation. The amount of ground you can cover with a slight turn of the head is beyond belief.
To the left, on a clear day is the back-side of Rincon’s world-famous bend and Malibu sitting some 50-miles beyond. On the right is the fabled Gaviota Coast with Point Conception standing sentry at the far reaches. In between is a big blanket of ocean interrupted only by broad sections of Channel Islands National Park—Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, and Anacapa Islands all vying for attention. Stretch your arms wide and it feels as though you can embrace it all, the hinge of Central California clear to the chaos of Los Angeles. After the sun goes down, the visual show shifts from the sparkle of the sea to the twinkling of the city lights below. And when the fog rolls in the A-frame is often perched above it, gazing out upon a fluffy landscape that makes walking to Hawaii seem like a distinct possibility.
“We’re so fortunate to have found this place,” beams Johnson during dessert at the aforementioned dinner party. His smile is slightly informed by tequila and the spoonful of chocolate-fudge-brownie ice cream he has wedged in his mouth. His dog, Cheez, snoozes out by the fire. His daughter colors happily with two buddies in one of the house’s many nooks. His wife laughs with friends on a nearby couch. A break in his hectic travel schedule has allowed him enough time to soak it in. The stories fly all night, including a fantastic telling of the elk skull’s origin. (Yes, Jeff shot it. No, he isn’t typically a hunter.) “We took something a little more wild and rough, and made it ours,” he adds as his gaze drifts past me to the windows and the darkening vistas outside. “We can all can get our fix up here.”
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All photos courtesy of the Surf Shacks book series, available at www.indoek.com.
