Casa Bienvenida, Spanish for “House of Welcome,” was designed by Addison Mizner, the architect best known for defining the Mediterranean Revival style of Palm Beach. Completed in the early 1930s near East Valley Road in Montecito, it is Mizner’s only work in the Santa Barbara area. The estate appeared on screen as Alejandro Sosa’s Bolivian estate in Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983).

The house is built around a central patio and runs to roughly 40 rooms and more than 17,000 square feet. Rather than the Spanish Colonial Revival common in Montecito, Mizner drew on Italian and medieval architecture, using cloisters as a primary element, including a south cloister with a 20-foot vaulted ceiling. Landscape architect Lockwood de Forest designed the gardens, which originally included an Italian-style water garden of 70 small cascading ponds ending at a tea pavilion.

Architectural photographer Matt Walla photographed Casa Bienvenida, partnering with author Douglas Woods, for their Rizzoli book Santa Barbara: At Home in Paradise. Returning to the estate over the course of a year, Walla captured it in changing seasons and light, from morning sun in the courtyard to dusk in the cloisters, to tell the complete story of Mizner’s Montecito masterpiece.