zillow.com

Hold your horses: ten acres in Encinitas? Whoa, Nelly!

Raising large animals requires a bit more space than your average suburban tract lot yard can offer. Depending on where you are in the county, you’re going to need at least a half-acre lot, maybe an acre, if you want to keep animal control off your back. In real estate terms, we’d call such a parcel “horse property.” Of course, that’s far too pedestrian a term for Unreal Estate, so we’re going to go with something a little flashier. “Just 7 miles from the shore of the Pacific Ocean, this premier Equestrian Estate is a rare find in the beach community of Encinitas,” opens the Zillow pitch for 3113 Camino Del Rancho, a ten-acre horse property, er, equestrian estate, that also includes a mansion and guest house built in 2007, with just under 5600 square feet of living area combined. Let’s take a look around.

The listing opens with a couple of aerial shots. The first shows a good portion of the property, with a barn in the foreground, several separately-fenced grassy spaces, and the main house in the background. The next focuses on the house specifically, which looks pleasantly Mediterranean, thanks to its multicolored tile roof and rock exterior walls. Let’s descend.

An enormous arched wooden entry door cased in red brick leads us to a foyer, which in turn opens onto a living room where the rough-hewn ceiling beams and rock accent walls lend a bit of a rustic feeling to the place, without going overboard. I don’t know if I love the tile work on the floor, but we can give that a pass, because the rest of the room works well. We get a little peek at what looks like a library or office off to one side — for some reason, there is a ladder in there, though it doesn’t look like the shelves are high enough to really require one. A large painting of a horse’s head atop the fireplace reminds us that if we are here, it’s because we probably like horses. It helps complete the room’s look.

There follows a dining room, outfitted with white cloth chairs and a white rug perfect for showcasing colorful food spills. Otherwise, the room is fine, but after the success of the living room, I’m not impressed with either the size or style of this space. The kitchen is accessible through another arched passage off the living room that we must have missed the first time around — it’s not incredibly spacious, but it looks functional. I like the breakfast nook with its array of windows and what appears to be a potbellied stove. In fact, I like it much more than the formal dining room.

Rustic luxury, thanks in part to the very fine stone work.

zillow.com

We get to a bedroom that is, like the kitchen, perfectly serviceable if unremarkable — aside from another arched door leading to the bath, one that the listing tells us is hand-carved. What I appreciate more is outside: more of the “truly exceptional stone work [that] blends in antique brick through the exterior, interior, and privacy walls that surround the patios” is on display here. The stone does seem well-done, and given that the trend for modern houses is to buy sheets of fake rock pressed out of concrete and dyed to look real, I’d say that using the real thing does indeed qualify as exceptional.

But I’ve become distracted by the stones; the main thing to see here is that the patio wraps around the bedroom, and it does indeed boast a privacy wall that hides a little citrus tree, some lounge chairs, and a tiny pool. The listing calls this a “river flow pool.” I don’t know quite what that means, but I do know I would very much enjoy having my own private, hidden mini-pool.

Another bedroom offers its own sitting area and wet bar, which makes me think it’s the primary — but if so, why doesn’t it get the pool? We also see the bath, with still more of that exceptional stone work in the shower. It looks both pleasingly rustic and very difficult to clean. Then we get a few shots of a patio with an outdoor kitchen and the guest house, which seems to have been built with materials just as costly as in the main home. There’s also a “caretaker residence” that looks like a mobile home, but one that has been nicely remodeled inside.

On to the equestrian part of this equestrian estate: the listing would like us to know that there’s room to house as many as 20 horses, and that the grounds were “previously a training facility for top Grand Prix show jumpers. The equestrian areas include every equestrian amenity,” which I suppose is desirable. There’s also a well with a filtration system and direct access to “30+ miles of dedicated trails,” in case your horses are more the riding type than the jumping type. We get to see some outbuildings, a corral, a training ring, and the inside of the barn before our tour concludes. I don’t know enough about horses to know if every equestrian amenity is really included, but everything we do see certainly seems amenable enough, and I tend to believe the listing when it tells us that the “oversized clear, hard redwood fencing lends a substantial feeling.”

Public records list Camino 8, a limited liability company based out of Washington, as the estate’s owner. The property was last sold in 2018 for a reported $6 million in an off-market transaction, it was listed for sale in early January with a $9,750,000 asking price that remains unchanged to date.

• 3113 Camino Del rancho | Encinitas, 92024
• Current owner: Camino 8 LLC | Listing price: $9,750,000 | Beds: 5 | Baths: 6 | House size: 5600 sq ft