As 2009 has slowly drawn its fingernails down the chalkboard of our collective nerves, my Bay Area friends have been coming to me with magazines flipped open to images of exceptionally remote hideouts set deep in the wildest nature.

I’m used to this. I’ve been a travel editor in this town for a decade now, and people have always brought me pictures, in the same way they’d bring a celebrity shot to their hairdresser. Until last fall, though, they usually showed me splashy, can’t-top-this hotels known for a nightclub made of ice, or a half dozen pools patrolled by model-handsome teenagers asking to spritz your sunglasses, or ironic touches of postmillennial decor. Can we talk for a minute about that giant chair in the lobby of the Clift, in downtown San Francisco, circa 2001?

That was before. Now, it seems, the travel fantasy has gone all Robinson Crusoe. What overworked, overstimulated Bay Area professionals count as hot­spots in 2009 are tiny places where they can just go “poof” and disappear to a deck on the edge of no­­where. Open-air eco-lodges south of the border. Five-star tent hotels in the wilds of British Columbia. Decks suspended above the jungle canopy in Costa Rica. All places of intense privacy, luxurious in their own way yet rooted to their spot under a swath of open sky.

Of course, most people can’t afford to go far away for such indulgences—they’ve already canceled a trip to Italy or Bali because committing to the airfare, not to mention the time out of the office, seemed too chancy. So they’re looking for a civilized safari (maybe a canister of dark espresso delivered to their tent before a dawn yoga class under the trees; would a paddle across a bay to a table set for two on a lonely beach be too much to ask?) and seem sure that after two booms and a decade of travel-industry splurging, it must be around here somewhere.

This is when I break the news, as the preface to ticking off what the past 5 or 10 years have brought our way, that the fantasy of the perfectly intimate eco-lodge is one itch we just can’t scratch within driving distance.

Well, there is one place. Post Ranch Inn, in Big Sur, has been the proto—and the über—eco-lodge since it opened on a cliff above the world’s most jaw-dropping coastline 17 years ago, instantly reinventing how luxuriously invisible a hotel could be. The only hitch (and it’s a doozy) is the up to $2,200 per night it’ll run you for an oceanview room. Other local enterprises that have tried to charge less for eco-escapes have paid dearly for it. The Lodge at Sky­londa, a hiking retreat and spa in the redwoods above Silicon Valley, shuttered in 2003. Costanoa, which introduced us to the concept of “glamping” a decade ago, still occupies the same pristine piece of San Mateo coastline, but hotelier Joie de Vivre dumped it in 2003, and it has since changed hands again. These days, you’ll recognize it by the KOA campground sign on Highway 1.

That Post Ranch has not only survived but thrived is a testament to how well it pampers the recession-proof crowd while backing off enough to let its edge-of-the-universe location work its potent magic. The lack of other such fairyland eco-escapes, though, just demonstrates how hard Northern California can be on hoteliers crazy enough to try to give us what we want most. Dream of a place with lots of space but relatively few rooms to bring in cash, and set that dream on some of the most beautiful, stratospherically expensive, and hard-to-develop land on Earth, and someone (the dreamer, the banker, the guest) will have to pay for it.

Pat Kuleto’s Nick’s Cove, for example, is one of the triumphs of the past five years. But it also represents a cautionary tale about the difficulties: Kuleto’s idea was to fix up a dozen rotting fishing shacks near the oyster joints and placid kayaking routes that draw weekenders to Tomales Bay—something along the lines of Deetjen’s, in Big Sur: charming, cozy, reasonable…and shacky. But after a nearly decade-long battle to get the place approved, Kuleto could no longer afford to play just to us down-to-earth locals; he had to fancy the place up with Persian rugs, plasma-screen TVs, and claw-foot soaking tubs in bathrooms with radiant heating in the floors. In doing so, he followed the understandable tendency for hotels to push everything more upscale, even in down times, so they can command the higher rates that might thread the economic needle and convince rich people to fly in from New York, Dallas, Dubai.

Nick’s is a runaway hit, and when I spent a night there, I noticed that my cottage’s guestbook overflowed with exclamation points: “A perfect getaway!” “A dream!” “Everything we’d imagined!” But after the scrawled “Only $1,000 for a weekend—wow,” there was a telling kicker: “I could’ve gone to Mexico.” Touché. Yet hightailing it to Kuleto’s over-the-water cabins, all wood paneling and distressed furniture and taxidermy, clearly fits our bust-time mentality much better—even at $500 a night—than flying away for a several-thousand-dollar weekend at the party palace Wynn, in Vegas, or at Maui’s Grand Wailea.

This synchronicity also applies to the new spate of boom-era, $300- to $600-a-night cottages, most of them set in wine country. The cottage, in fact, has become a cottage industry that’s changed the Bay Area getaway as we know it. Instead of rooms, we now check in to bungalows with little patios, even itty-bitty yards, as if we’ve picked up and relocated to a simpler life for a couple of days. These resorts were designed for a flusher age. But somehow they predicted what post-meltdown locals would crave even more than spider monkeys swinging from the trees: elbow room.

The trend started in 2003 with The Carneros Inn, whose barn-chic, cedar-and–sheet metal cottages populate a wide-open hillside where vineyards roll out in all directions, followed by Calistoga Ranch, a hushed enclave of luxurious indoor­-outdoor bungalows clustered in an oaky canyon at the other end of the Napa Valley. I loved the weekends I spent with the bedroom doors flung open to private decks at both these places, so I was happy to see that Solage Calistoga, which opened on the outskirts of town in 2007, followed suit by scattering sunny yellow cottages across an open field (though, to keep rates a couple hundred dollars lower, each actually holds a side-by-side duplex, and many patios look across the way to someone else’s). Yountville’s new Bardessono, a modern compound of precise lines and right angles that does a 180 away from the town’s usual faux-French and faux-Tuscan inns, directs guests over bridges and past trickling streams and fans them out to several courtyards, some with a dozen or so rooms opening onto them. I’m not sure whether wine-country visitors will warm to Bardessono’s unadorned aesthetic, but breaking up the hotel into clusters is genius—it guarantees that the space never feels congested and that guests, unless they’re asleep, are rarely indoors.

The idea driving each of these neighborhood-style resorts is to eliminate anything that smushes us in with other people, including hallways and elevators. At the Carneros Inn, cottages are grouped around common lawns with fountains, as if at dusk all the guests are going to pour out their front doors, casseroles in hand, for a potluck. Parked in front of my door at Solage were two single-speed cruiser bikes, one of which I used to zip from my cottage down the lane to the pool, and, later, from the spa over to dinner. And things get downright Norman Rockwell–esque at my newest go-to splurge, Cavallo Point Lodge, which is tucked into a cove at the Marin end of the Golden Gate Bridge. Once home to naval officers’ families, its stately, century-old white houses with red roofs all have a wooden staircase leading up to a porch where a pair of rocking chairs invites you to sit and spin a yarn or two.

The cottage trend has white-trash roots: Both Carneros and Calistoga Ranch got green-lighted by piggybacking on existing zoning for trailer parks. (Little-known but amusing fact: Peel back the cedar shingles at the base of a posh Calistoga Ranch love nest, and you’ll find four tires underneath.) Yet the formula is pushed by the same economics behind Kuleto’s $500 shacks. “It’s a rate game,” explains Philip Kendall, who has run both Calistoga Ranch and the Carneros Inn. “These places feel more like suites. The privacy is sexy, and people will pay a higher rate for that”—as they will for an interior that contrasts with the folksy exterior and goes all city bachelor pad on you, with sleek gas fireplaces, flat-screen TVs, Eames chairs, and pillowy beds. The effect is a sexed-up version of home, a place where you can pretend your typical afternoon involves a tub, a glass of wine, and a long soak—rather than working late at the office or spending six hours cleaning out the garage.

Then, for those who don’t like resorts or can’t afford them more than once a year, there’s the final frontier: the simple, quirky, affordable cottage that’s not about the pool, the room service, or the bellman. This is the regular escape hatch, private and quiet, your little rental in the country.

You’d think that these would have become as rare as $1,000 San Francisco apartments, but in the past decade or so, they, too, have kept cropping up. My personal favorite is Mar Vista Cottages, which feels better than ever this time around the recession block. I’ve spent half a dozen weekends hidden away in one of its perfectly retro 1930s cottages, which are scattered across a field on the Mendocino County coast. Thanks to Renata Dorn’s long career as a manager in some of San Francisco’s finickiest hotels, the cottages are sparklingly clean and full of unexpected touches you won’t find anywhere else, like sheets that are clothespinned up in the sun over lavender plants, then hand-pressed before being smoothed across your bed, fragrant and crisp. I loved my cottage’s window linens, accented with bits of vintage fabric, so much that I tracked down the Englishwoman who makes them and hired her to design a set for my bedroom at home.

“I always say, thank god we didn’t have a lot of money when we opened in 2000,” says Dorn’s husband, Tom, who helps her run the place, “because it helped us keep everything simple. And that’s what really resonates with people.”

Of course, a stay at Mar Vista means kissing things like private granite soaking tubs goodbye. There’s no room service to call. But more and more people I know are turning to similarly pared-down retreats, where the proprietors essentially hand you the keys and leave you in peace for less than $300—and sometimes less than $200—a night. These locals are booking an airy cottage out in the orchard at the famously idyllic Philo Apple Farm in Anderson Valley, or, on the crest of the hills above, a bright, cheery home at the Other Place with a killer view and an open meadow.

Yes, you’ll probably have to make do without a pool or a TV in your room (the latter omission is always a bonus in my book, yet it’s a choice the fan­cier places, with the sole exception of Post Ranch, don’t feel they can get away with). But the upside is that you can go the whole weekend without running into another soul at the Other Place. At Mar Vista, you’re welcome to pick veggies from the organic garden for dinner and snip flowers from the cutting garden for a centerpiece. Looking out over endless oak-covered hilltops from your tub at Long Valley Ranch’s DogTrot cottage, you might think it’s a bit of a miracle that places like this still exist.

But people do find such places, even here. My friend Susan returns once a year to the Julia Morgan lodges at Asilomar, across the street from the pounding surf in Pacific Grove. My friend Christine recently fell for the in-room sauna and freebies, like a gourmet s’mores bar, at western Sonoma’s Farmhouse Inn, then turned around a few weeks later and went back for her birthday. Most of my friends have a place they can’t mention without breaking into a smile.

When Tom Dorn recently told me that my favorite Mar Vista Cottage, number 6, burned down when a painter left a tarp over the stove, I actually got misty. It made me think that maybe the Bay Area’s budget and luxury fantasies have finally converged. For as much as I enjoyed the $2,200 Post Ranch suite I stayed in last spring, I don’t think I’d need a hankie if someone told me it had gone up in smoke.

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Lisa Trottier, San Francisco's former managing editor and travel editor, has been covering California getaways for a decade.

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