NICASIO, Calif. — Although Susan and Nicholas Pritzker purchased their $2.5-million ranch several years ago, it was not until they disclosed plans to build a 10-structure family compound totaling 54,000 square feet that residents learned of the renowned hotelier's desire to go rural -- very rural.
An hour's drive north of San Francisco, Nicasio's population of 589 could fit into just one of the Pritzker family's 212 Hyatt hotels.
Yet this is the community in which Nicholas Pritzker, chairman and president of Hyatt Development Corp. and president of Hyatt Equities, and his wife, Susan, a part-time philanthropist and full-time mother, want to settle.
A privately held company, Hyatt manages and owns hotels, resorts, apartment complexes, casinos, senior citizen housing and health care businesses. The large Pritzker family is among the wealthiest in the nation.
Not all of Nicasio embraces the Pritzker plan. That the Pritzkers want to build a complex of oversized houses, critics say, despoils the very beauty that drew them to Nicasio.
Nicasio is so picture perfect that some days, dozens of painters trek into town to paint what artist Eric Whitten called "the sensuous landscape."
Hollywood location scouts, familiar with the territory, use it for commercials, although the proprietors of the local restaurant did reject a Dannon Yogurt request to bring "a trained cow" through the dining room.
Daffodils whip in the wind. Ravens swoop and dairy cattle graze on the green hills with rocky outcroppings.
The New England-style St. Mary's Church still stands alone, as it has since 1867. A slightly younger, cherry-red one-room schoolhouse sits by a larger school, housing all 61 students.
Most days, the town's ranchers and other residents crowd into the general store, restaurant, bar or post office -- all in one building that makes up the entire downtown. There's not a concierge or glass elevator within miles.
Initial plans for the Pritzkers' 845-acre ranch call for a 12,000-square-foot main ranch house, a caretaker's residence and an agricultural building. The pool house, garages, farming facilities and other houses, for their four children and two grandchildren, would be built over the course of many years.
That the buildings would not be visible from the road and that they would take up only a tiny portion of the land seems to matter little in the debate.
