California Dreamers, Take Note

There’s a particular breed of Californian once called “dreamers of the golden dream” by the state’s scribe, Joan Didion. You know who they are. Now see where they live.

After all, where would you live if you had a zillion dollars and had veered so far west you were teetering at the edge of the Pacific? How about an iconic John Lautner house in Malibu with glass walls embracing the edge of the Pacific?

A little short on cash? Then dream about someone else’s dream house in “Living on the Water” (Rizzoli), a global guidebook to breaking the commandment about not coveting thy neighbor’s incredible digs. It’s the third glossy coffee-table browser by Elizabeth McMillian, an art historian at USC and a former Architectural Digest editor. Here we think we identify with the rest of you militant California-philes, and suddenly we’re thinking, hmmmm, if we could hang our hat in a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired home on a Louisiana lake, even Shreveport would start looking mighty tasty.

“You’re just compelled to be by the water,” McMillian says. “Mountaintops and so forth are really nice, but there’s a liveliness to water and drama to waves.”

Sold. If someone would give it up to the lowest bidder.

By the way, it helps to be a little nutty if you actually want to make the great escape. “A lot of these people are eccentric in that they live in very remote places,” McMillian says of her waterside denizens from Sag Pond in the Hamptons to Nairobi’s Lake Naivasha.

If Kenya isn’t on your itinerary, you might check out an upcoming magazine that proves there’s no place like home. McMillian and Architectural Digest graduates Steve Moser and Michelle Hudspeth are launching Southland in April as a kind of SoCal Town & Country.

We are chowing down with McMillian over Chinese takeout in Southland’s temporary offices downtown, and we’re wondering about the mini-defection, given Architectural Digest Editor Paige Rense’s reputation for strong rule .

“The structure at the Digest is very tight and very limited,” says McMillian, Southland’s editor in chief, “but it also covers the world, and we wanted to do a regional magazine.”

Which might be even more of a challenge, given L.A.’s recent rocky flings with local magazines. But McMillian is betting that high-end advertisers will want to reach Southland’s targeted high-end readers wooed by the magazine’s richly photographed editorial blend--the luxe life in architecture, neighborhoods and collectibles as well as profiles of philanthropists and dynamos. There’s also this twist: McMillian, who teaches a course on Spanish colonial architecture, is keen on a multicultural mix, tracking glossy new ground where elitism and diversity converge.

“I like the idea of breaking down boundaries by showing the best,” McMillian says. “And the arts show us higher areas of ourselves so we can find areas of common ground.”

Irene Lacher’s Out & About column runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on Page 2.