Gail Gelles
Reprinted by permission from Santa Barbara Magazine

In 1965 the late Cynthia Wood, heiress to an oil fortune and a top breeder of Salukis, was thinking about opening a breeding and training stable for American Saddlebred horses and hackney ponies.

Wood went for it. With the lavish backing of her father, rancher Buddy Wood, she hired Santa Barbara architects Arndt, Mosier, and Grant to build an elegant, air-conditioned twenty-seven stall horse barn, bought out the contract of Bill Rowan, the top trainer in California, and opened Stalloreggi. Within a couple of years it was one of the best stables in the country. Wood added a splendid stallion barn, outbuildings, paddocks, and an arena, and her champion Saddlebreds, bearing such names as Red Rambler, Society's Wild Genius, and Cynthia's Party Punch, were known and shown across the country.

Wood abruptly left the horse business and closed Stalloreggi in 1983, selling the property to developer Ron Uhles, who peeled off two residential lots along the road and converted Wood's breeding barn into a house. In the early nineties, Uhles rented the main barn to Liz and Mike Martin, specialists in training and showing American Saddlebred horses, who continued the tradition Cynthia Wood had begun. But running a high-quality stable is an expensive proposition. Maintenance was deferred and it seemed only a matter of time before Stalloreggi would be gobbled up by development.

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