What It’s Like to Manage an 18-Acre Garden Estate | Temecula Event Venue

The fine print of living somewhere beautiful.

I live in real life Wonderland.

Well, I manage an eighteen-acre garden estate in the rolling hills of California wine country.

It is a place unlike any other, where you will get lost, get distracted, get carried away. It will swaddle you in spider webs and swallow you whole.

“A place like this makes you want to live forever,” one of our guests once told me.

Now I’ve never heard a truer sentence, but working where you live can produce an unexpected sort of overstimulation.

Thousands of guests pass through in a year, and all manner of mischief occurs as a result; people chase each other through our hedge maze and over our giant chess board. There is a constant whiplash between my desire to enjoy the gardens and an ever-present fear that I’m not living up to their beauty.

It is both a place of escape and a place that needs constant tending.

I was cheated on here,then fell in love again here. 

Mix it all together and you get the kind of job you can’t, in good conscience, complain about. 

Because I live here, I am in charge of the following (in no particular order): the tours, the events, the laundry, the maintenance coordination, and the estate itself, which is fifty years old and constantly shifting somewhere under its many brick-laden paths, ancient arches, and aggressive ivy. When a guest books an event here, they have an expectation of order and beauty. I’m on the hunt for anything that could shatter that illusion and in doing so I am repeatedly shattering it for myself. I am noting the cracked glass, the torn wallpaper, the sickly pine tree. Boiled down: it’s my job to look for the imperfections, not the fairytale.

But all the best fairytales have their dark sides.

It’s usually what makes them so compelling.

In Lewis Caroll’s Wonderland, we find it full of time-obsessed characters, but time never behaves. Clocks exist, but they fail to organize experience. The White Rabbit is always rushing, (for what exactly is never clear.) Alice stumbles through the disorienting landscape in the same dreamlike way I do here. I walk for ten minutes and somehow an hour is lost. I look up and rub my eyes and think, Where am I going again?

This is where the manor will really knock you off balance — in the Wonderlandian way she steals from you. Time, items, sense of place. If you need to get from the wine cave to the top of the manor’s tower, you will have no choice but to wind your way through pathways that loop you back to where you started instead of where you were headed. If you set something down you may spend hours searching and still never find it again. I lost a whole ladder once, for days at a time, only to find it tucked behind one of our hedges. Acres of rose bushes try to snag you and stop you. It’s an ever-shifting landscape, an estate built for the sure-footed, an estate that, over time, grew a mind and heart of her own. 

Bricks emerge from nowhere – sometimes I secretly believe the roots push them up when you’re approaching and the sand shifts them back once you’ve passed. Really, the whole place is a trip hazard dressed as a daydream. It is the childhood fantasy you always had in your periphery, a playground for anyone with a big enough imagination and a penchant for climbing stairs. This place, she could be dressed in fine silks or left to her own accord. Either way, she demands intention and attention and rewards you tenfold.

It is my sacred duty to know the fastest way through the roses at any given time.

It is why I have become the accidental, last-minute wedding planner or event coordinatorwhen the ones our guests hire falls short. I am the catch-all, the last line of defense. Sometimes I can tame her, but it is rare. This place, she will laugh at you for trying to eat from single-use flatware and whip them off your tables with a gust of wind so precise it shatters the plastic. You will think you know where you’re going, you will think you’ve got it handled by yourself, and then the sheer size of her, the mighty heart of her, will turn everything you thought before coming here upside down.

I’d like to think we have a very good working relationship now. We respect each other. I let the ivy climb where it pleases and forgive the occasional rebellion; in return she slows her winds by sunsets and bathes us in early morning fog. 

You can understand the difficulty of holding a vision in Chaos and trying to enact any daydreams, but daydream I do. How we need café seating and a built-in coffee/pastry bar in our two-story gazebo. And to organize a property-sprawling, murder mystery game with a grand showdown in our hedge maze. And to host writing retreats that utilize our ballroom as a massive, Hogwarts-style classroom. And enjoy wine tastings and poetry readings in our hill-hewn stone cave. And, and, and…

The current owner (my employer) once joked my job was the best job and the worst job. But it’s not even that, it’s chaos and then it’s recovery, it’s weddings and then it’s memorials. It’s a place that vanishes the rest of the world, where big and tiny things happen, and the one you least expect to go wrong goes wrong. The good news is no one really notices except me, because for everyone else, it is their first time in Wonderland. Their head is still tipped back, eyes wide and scanning the four-story towers, the 100-foot Cyprus and the owls who fly between them, patient on their perches.

Alice sighed wearily. ‘I think you might do something better with the time,’ she said, ‘than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.’

‘If you knew Time as well as I do,’ said the Hatter, ‘you wouldn’t talk about wasting it.’

Time has paid special attention to this place, with its 30-year-old eucalyptus and its unrepeatable gardens. I roam the pathways with coffee or tea or what-have-you in hand. I ceaselessly find the joy. The morning is quiet and the fog is still slinking through. I watch our nearest but still distant neighbor roll by on her horse-drawn carriage. For me, uniquely, the beautiful and the wretched are not opposites here, they’re often the same thing, experienced simultaneously. 

And in the stillness, my whole self comes rushing back to me, the way it does after waking from a particularly vivid dream. There is clarity, and more — a benediction; I am reminded why I should wear clown makeup and organize a circus for my friends, why I should call my mom and talk about the wildflowers she’s planting, why I should let the years have their way with me because everything gets better with age. What the hell, I am living in the 18-acre proof of it.