Mixing Home, Kids, and Business

Sarah Robarts is a Pacific Palisades loyalist. ‘I love Ivy Greene,’ she says softly with a charming English accent, beaming, as her youngest, son Jamie, 5, runs around in a ‘Transformers’ shirt she bought for him there. She champions other local spots, listing the Village Pantry, Beech Street Cafe, Taj Palace and Vittorio’s (‘the garlic balls!’) among her favorites, and like many a Palisadian, she’s made many business connections via her kids at their Palisades schools (Seven Arrows and Marquez Elementary). Last year, when Robarts moved her business, Ballantines Public Relations, out of two offices she occupied at the Spectrum building on Sunset at PCH, she and her boyfriend decided to relocate from her Highlands address to a Paseo Miramar mansion which serves the dual purpose of home and work. You see, her house serves a key role in drumming up business, and Pacific Palisades is a big part of the branding for Robarts’ PR firm. She also relies on Palisadian Bruce Hulse, the Cornell-educated male supermodel who works with Robarts in a freelance capacity, using his deep fashion-industry connections to expand Ballantines PR’s clientele fold. So when the Palisadian-Post caught up with Robarts on a recent weekday afternoon, the company president was in her living room, seated next to Hulse, impeccably dressed in a dark blue pin-stripe suit, and her casually attired boyfriend, Matt Grant, a fellow Brit who starred in last year’s ‘The Bachelor’ on ABC. Essentially, the attractive English blond Robarts is flanked by a de-facto American James Bond and the British ‘Bachelor’ (some nifty self-marketing right there). Robarts’ business space transcends the typical home office. With her 20-something team”Cara, Erika, Jeremy, Michelle, Virginia”Robarts has turned her lower-level space into something of a war room, with a lengthy client roster taking up a chart on the far wall amid rows of desks. Her accounts are impressive. They include Interiors on high-end trendy Robertson Boulevard, the Palisades-based charity Everychild Foundation, Z-Coil footwear, Africa Safari Camps, and the state of New Mexico’s tourism department. In fact, Ballantines is handling the city of Santa Fe’s 400th anniversary. The firm just tackled Twestival, a February 12 charity event in partnership with the social media network site Twitter that blended music, comics and celebrities to raise money for CharityWater; and Rock Paper Scissors, a February 28 art exhibition at Bergamot Station’s Robert Berman Gallery, which featured the works of Raymond Pittibon, Daniel Johnston and members of avant-garde rockers Sonic Youth with guest DJ Shephard Fairey (President Obama’s official pop artist). Also in Santa Monica, Ballantines is working on the current exhibit of late photographer Dan Eldon’s work at the Pete and Susan Barrett Art Gallery. Robarts’ 18-member staff is also preparing for the reboot of the refurbished Shangri-La Hotel on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. The April re-opening promises to feature a who’s who from the fashion world, overseen by Hulse. Not bad for a PR company that literally fell into Robarts’ lap. ‘I started my business six years ago on my laptop in my bedroom,’ she says, adding that she had to juggle growing her firm and making business trips to New Mexico to handle PR for the Galisteo Inn with breastfeeding and changing diapers. Robarts derived her moniker from the Ballantines Hotel in Palm Springs, owned by her hotel-magnate ex-husband, whom she split from a couple of years ago. She lived in Palm Springs before moving to the Highlands with her former husband in 2003. But Robarts, who turns 40 in April, grew up in Kenya, East Africa. Her parents, she says, ‘were Baha’i pioneers/missionaries to Uganda and then Kenya.’ She moved to Kingston, Canada, to attend Queens College, and then received her MFA in painting at Nice University in the South of France before relocating to London. An avid painter, Robarts found work at a PR firm. When a principal of the firm went on maternity leave, Robarts took over. ‘There was no turning back,’ she says, although, truth be told, she still paints, her large abstracts occupying the high walls of her Ray Schlick-designed home on Paseo Miramar. In fact, that multi-tiered Modernist mansion”with its balcony decks and expansive gallery-space living room”comes equipped with high ceilings and ample windows, which frame a killer view of the Pacific Ocean. The home has become a key weapon in her PR arsenal; the perfect place to hold dinner parties, cocktails and special events conducive to Robarts’ all-important networking. Last year, she hosted a reception for New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. While living in Palm Springs, Robarts worked on PR for (and helped manage) one of her husband’s hotels. Post-divorce, she saw her home business swell. Parent-to-parent networking at her children’s schools (her daughter Daisy, 6, attends Marquez) helped grow Ballantines. ‘I’ve learned so much from the parents on the PR committee at Seven Arrows,’ she says. Today, she manages publicity accounts nationwide, in China and England, the latter with the help of her boyfriend Grant, who a year ago was seen gallivanting with assorted women weekly on network television. ‘I’ve been around a lot of PR people,’ says Hulse (see ‘Model Citizen,’ September 11, 2008, at the PalisadesPost.com archives). ‘Sarah’s a pleasure to be around. She understands literature, art, travel. It’s very fun to be her associate.’ Grant also speaks from personal experience. ‘Everything that is good in my career has come through her introductions,’ he says. ‘She sees all the connections between books, movies.’ Some of those good things include a political-satire cable program he has in the works with columnist Joel Stein, another reality show opportunity, and other talk-show variety projects that the ‘season 12 ‘Bachelor” is pursuing. ‘It’s her ability to network, her vision,’ Grant says. ‘I’ve watched other PR people work and it makes me realize how good Sarah is.’ He adds that her affable socializing approach is not forced, but natural. Moving her business to Paseo Miramar was a savvy move, Grant adds: ‘It was a real revelation to consolidate the office and the abode here. Of course, Sarah loves having her children nearby.’ ‘I wanted to be somewhere where I can work and be with family and be ‘green’,’ Robarts says, enthusiastically. And no amount of marketing can out-hype the attributes of that. Contact: (310) 454-3080; email bpr@ballantinespr.com. Visit www.ballantinespr.com