Sara Nichols riding in front of her house in Pacific Palisades, where the horses live in the front yard.

STYLE DESK | September 4, 2005, Sunday

To Live and Ride in L.A.

By MIREYA NAVARRO
Published: September 4, 2005

LOS ANGELES

LIFE is good for Rocket, the urban horse. He lives in a wooded neighborhood in one of the most exclusive sections of Los Angeles, Sullivan Canyon, nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the 405 freeway and oblivious to the traffic, sprawl and shopping enclaves around him.

Just minutes from Rocket are the villages of Brentwood and Pacific Palisades, with their expensive boutiques and Starbucks. But Rocket inhabits a different Los Angeles, one where traffic signs read: "Whoa. Horses and Children at Play. 10 m.p.h.," and $3 million homes come with corrals. The wealthy put up with dusty surroundings and the scent of manure.

"It's so incongruous, but I'm so grateful," said Sara Nichols, a Democratic fund-raiser and environmentalist, who keeps Rocket and three other horses in front of her California ranch home designed by Clifford May. "A day doesn't go by that I don't think, 'Wow, am I lucky.' "

In few places in the country are horses more surprising, yet more sought after, than in Los Angeles. The horse is an almost mythic element in an area that grew out of ranches and citrus groves and burnished its image in part as a setting for Hollywood westerns. Horsemanship traces back to Mexican vaquero culture, and to own horses feeds into the dream of the West's unrestricted freedom the way a boat and private dock feed into the image of aquatic glamour in Miami - and can be as much a status symbol.

Los Angeles County may now contain 10 million or so people locked in daily urban rituals, but modern-day cowboys are found in unexpected places, in horse communities in the manicured byways of Brentwood as well as in the urban grit of Compton.

"You don't have anything quite like it elsewhere," said Jennifer Ruffolo, a senior park and recreation specialist at the California Parks and Recreation Department. "It is striking to see people with horses in their backyards in some of the priciest real estate in the city."