How to Search for Utopia at Sea Ranch
Is it still a vision of the future—or just another playground for the rich? Photographer Elizabeth Carababas talks peace, paradoxes, and the intoxicating “optimism of a daydream.”
Welcome to A Time of Gifts, a newsletter that’s loosely about travel and living well, written by me, Shona Sanzgiri, a journalist and photographer who lives in L.A.
Editor’s note: I’ll spare you the preamble about the state of the world. But a newsletter about “travel and living well” has started to feel trivial, even tone-deaf.
I’m absolutely not advising anyone to disengage, but: it’s worth looking beyond the present moment. It’s an idea I picked up from Andrew Huberman (I know, I know) about “panoramic vision” and the benefits to your nervous system of letting your eyes settle on something distant.
Indifferent. Steady. A line you move toward without ever reaching.
That’s the spirit of this newsletter: Apartamento-style interviews about people and places in pursuit of that line.
Elizabeth Carababas is an architectural photographer I discovered via Instagram around the time I moved to L.A. She’s shot for Architectural Digest, Dwell, Monocle, and Vogue, with clients ranging from LVMH to Nike.
Born just outside Detroit and now based in South Pasadena (very close to where I live, too), her work treats the built environment with the same reverence usually reserved for mountains or the ocean—as if buildings, too, are ecosystems.
I like architecture, but my interest has always been fairly surface-level. Her photographs made me see L.A. with more depth, focusing on small, selective details—as well as mood and intimacy—instead of feeling swallowed by the sprawl. I especially love her interior work, like this gorgeous photo from Milan’s Salone de Mobile.
Recently, Elizabeth stayed in Sea Ranch, the planned mid-century community a couple hours north of San Francisco. Coincidentally, we were there at the same time, though our paths didn’t cross.
While I got stoned and wandered the cliffside for my 40th birthday, overly aware of my breathing and the wind, Elizabeth was there on assignment for The Panafold (“A Map of the World”), writing and taking pictures.
I wanted to know what that felt like—moving through a place where the built world is trying, so deliberately, to blend into the natural one.
Shona: You're from Detroit, right?
Elizabeth: Just north of it. My family grew up in the Grosse Pointe communities, which is the first suburb group upriver. Michigan in general is beautiful and more diverse than people [might] think.
I joke with my friends and call it the “Florida of the north” because there’s this big, beautiful peninsula surrounded by water. The difference between the upper peninsula and the lower peninsula is so vast. The upper peninsula is very forested with beautiful rock formations, mountains, sea caves, and these massive sand dunes.
And if you’re standing by Lake Michigan, you’d think it’s an ocean. The water is crystal clear and it can be violent, but it’s so beautiful to live close to. I feel spoiled to have grown up with the Great Lakes.
There’s nowhere else in the country like [Michigan], but it comes with really awful weather.
You mentioned the upper peninsula. My brother-in-law, who moved to Michigan from California with my sister-in-law and their kids, was telling me about the wildness of the upper peninsula, how it’s still a frontier in many ways, how Michiganders want to keep it that way.
It’s funny because I had this conversation with a friend recently about Sea Ranch. And he said, “where else could a place like this exist?” And I had this almost instantaneous response: Northwestern Michigan on the edge of Lake Michigan.
I don’t mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I think in the next 50 to 100 years, one of the biggest assets in this country will be freshwater. So, to have those resources—I mean, I started thinking, “damn, should I start my own Sea Ranch?”
Let’s talk about Sea Ranch. I’m from Northern California and remember going there once when I was a kid with my mom and, perhaps unsurprisingly, hating it. And then I went back 30 years later this past summer for my 40th birthday and, also unsurprisingly, loved it. This wasn’t your first trip, was it?
It was.
Oh wow, OK. Your piece about it is so intimate and well researched. I just figured you knew it well.
Yeah, I’d been obsessing over it since I moved to California 10 years ago, but never got to go until recently.
I’d put it on a pedestal in some ways because everything I’d read or seen about it was so special. And I really wanted to, “do it the right way.” I wanted find a house that I really wanted to stay in, get enough time off from work, and throw myself in the deep end.
Which is to say: go there for three or four days, walk around, be alone, don’t bring friends or my dog, and just sit with it, let it reveal itself to me.
I’m glad it went that way because there’s this intuitive part of being a photographer and a writer, where your mind and heart are looking at separate things at the same time, if that makes sense.
Yes, definitely. I relate to that as a writer who picked up photography as a way to overcome writer’s block, but also as a means of embracing ambiguity.
Sea Ranch is an interesting place for that because, yes, visually it has its own vernacular with the locally-sourced materials and the inspiration from the land, with the sloping hills. But there’s also this feeling that’s hard to describe.
And that’s why photography is right for me at this point in my life. There are some things you cannot say with literature, and vice versa.
So it was the first time I was given an assignment to do both—writing and photographing.
What made you want to photograph it?
I was intrigued by this idea that there’s a clean set of rules, or guidelines. So much can happen under certain constraints. That’s something architects have to deal with on a daily basis.
I’ve always been attracted to cities, but I’m also someone who is incredibly critical of them. In some ways I don’t think cities are healthy for us.
To then find a place that’s orbiting around this feeling of needing to live in harmony with nature, how to dwell without overpowering the environment and instead treating it as sacred, is so noble and alluring.
Your piece begins with that—the aspiration of utopia, the “dream of dwelling in harmony with the land.” How did the reality of Sea Ranch match or challenge or complicate that utopian vision?
I didn’t expect myself to be so critical of it. When you’re first driving to Sea Ranch, as you know, you feel a shift. You’re excited to be there, uncovering various corners of it and just seeing what’s around.
But the more time you spend there, the more you feel like maybe we’re drifting from the original vision. You go on Zillow and see how expensive the houses are (editor’s note: calling dibs on this one), and I thought, “this can’t be the original idea.”
I went days without seeing anyone. The people I encountered were pleasant enough, but I was lonelier than I expected. This is a place where people have their second or third homes, and there’s not much to do there.
On a second trip up, my car got stranded and I had no resources to fix it—essentially my biggest nightmare. I went off the road, bottomed out my car, and bent my rim so badly that I immediately lost tire pressure. I haven’t changed a tire in a decade and the closest tow truck was two hours away.
Luckily I got it sorted the next day, but it reminded me how hard it would be to live here year-round. You really have to be comfortable spending time alone.
I went with a group, including my wife, but I found myself wanting to be alone often. Before we went for a long walk, I ate a few weed gummies, got surprisingly high, and started feeling in, let’s say, communion with the trees, but not necessarily wanting to be in communion with the group, who gracefully sensed my desire for some solo time.
Which is to say: it’s the kind of place where loneliness and nature are the fabric and to properly engage, you need to succumb.
Exactly. The landscape invites that. It’s part of the original intention. There’s this community aspect, too, but a kind of community as a punctuation in the development, to give it room to breathe.
I love how your photographs evoke that—punctuation, room to breathe. There’s also a tenderness that appears in an attention to detail that’s as much about texture and shadow as it is hard lines and materials.
Do you set out to photograph in that way?
It’s a hard question, but it’s a good one because it’s forcing me to go into how my brain works, which, when you’ve been doing it this long, has a tendency to go into autopilot.
I always see the forest first, by which I mean absorbing the whole. And then as I get closer, I start to fixate on details.
It’s like what Roland Barthes said about the “punctum” of an image. There’s the “studium,” or the general interest of a photograph, and then the “punctum,” which is the pointed thing that makes the photograph work for you.
So I’m always looking for what that thing is, whether it’s a beam of light or the tree next to the house.
A lot of your Sea Ranch photos feel as much about what’s in the frame as what’s outside of it. Are you conscious of that absence?
Yeah, especially with the Sea Ranch photos. It was something I was thinking about when editing.
How do I choose frames that communicate how small I knew I was in the landscape? How do I get give things room to breathe? It’s like a storytelling tactic. Trying to make people feel what it’s really like in this very vast vista, how small the houses look.
Did you find examples of the contradictions of its present state with its original vision?
Oh, yeah. It’s easy to spot the new construction because it’s all these massive houses. And there’s no shortage of windows.
But it can feel crowded and antithetical to the point of being there. They stick out like sore thumbs, albeit designed with materials in a way that looks like the Sea Ranch vernacular, but without any spirit.
I’m reminded of the Sea Ranch Lodge. It was fine—decent food that wouldn’t be out of place in San Francisco, postcard views. Merch. $22 glasses of wine.
Like a resort.
Right. Like a mindless resort. And it made me wonder if that was symbolic of the larger development. Things have gotten so commercialized and expensive, that it attracts a certain type of person, but isn’t available to everyone.
I totally agree. At the same time, you can only protect paradise for so long.
It’s the AirBnb-ification of it. To some extent, tourism keeps the lights on. But it’s like what one of the original lawyers for Sea Ranch said: “you can’t be upset that you didn’t reach Utopia.” We were never going to get there to begin with.
I wonder if anyone would ever put their foot down and say, in the future it shouldn’t be this way?
Ultimately I’m trying to loosen my grip on it and be less of a purist and just think, you know, the lodge probably did need an upgrade at some point [laughs].
Maybe a glass of wine does have to be $22 if it costs millions to redo this place.
Yeah. To some extent it does boil down to access and money.
A good example of this is Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti in Arizona, where I used to live. I did a construction residency there a few years ago, because it’s basically a construction site. It broke maybe a decade after Sea Ranch and had a lot of similar ideas from the 70s—the harmony with nature.
Thinking of space and architecture as an ecology rather than just a forced built environment. Seeing things as meant to change and grow and adapt to the environment, like a living organism.
I was always so fascinated with Soleri’s teachings because he really wanted to make a city that was as sustainable as possible—the food nexus, the energy nexus, everything being very full circle and serving itself.
I went there thinking, “oh, I’m going to learn so much about sustainability.” But when I got there, you realize how hard it is to build and to have an idea so grand. It was kind of a pipe dream from the start.
Why was that?
It’s just so expensive. And sure, Arcosanti might become a finished city at some point, but will it take the checkbook of someone like Elon Musk to do it? Everything is supposed to be self serving, the community full circle—not driven by outside forces, and especially not outside capital.
They really tried and they just didn’t succeed, because it is so hard to build fully, 100% sustainable nowadays.
What advice would you give to someone going to Sea Ranch?
Number one, bring a coat and a hat. It’s always going to be colder than you think. And two, be on foot most of the day—really try to walk as much as possible. You notice more when you’re on foot. And also, don’t look down. I think when you live in a city, you look down too much.
Listen to Elizabeth’s excellent Sea Ranch Soundtrack.
My favorite things this week
✊ Your friends are still acting like everything is normal in America. What do you do? (Vox)
📽️ “Sirāt” Is a Harrowing, Exhilarating Dance of Death (New Yorker) I meant to see this Spanish thriller about a Sahara rave and a father’s harrowing search for his daughter, and was bummed it vanished from theaters so quickly. Ahead of the Oscars, it’s back this week. Justin Chang of The New Yorker listed it as his favorite film of 2025.
👵👴 What if Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do? (The Atlantic)
TTFN — ta ta for now.
-SS
A pleasure rambling with you, Shona 🙏🏼