Sunset magazine, which for more than a century has chronicled California living from the kitchen to the patio and beyond, will pack up its test kitchens and garden tools and find a new home.

In a letter to employees last week, Time Inc. announced that it had sold Sunset’s serene 7-acre Menlo Park, Calif., campus of carefully designed gardens and 1950s ranch-style buildings to Embarcadero Capital Partners, a San Francisco real estate investment and management company. The price of the deal has not been disclosed, but it has been estimated to be at least $77 million, according to a report in the Silicon Valley Business Journal.

The buildings, which total 77,000 square feet, were designed by Cliff May, the architect many consider the father of the California ranch home. His work helped articulate in architecture the postwar West Coast suburban boom and spawned a lifestyle that Sunset embraced.

"When I moved to Berkeley in 1973, I had all these articles I had been pulling out of Sunset," said Ruth Reichl, the former editor of Gourmet magazine and a former New York Times restaurant critic. "I had one that told you how to build your own bread oven in your backyard. They were so ahead of the curve. They made California seem like the most romantic place on earth."

Time Inc. will continue to publish Sunset. The magazine offices will stay on the campus until the end of next year, but the hunt is on for new offices and a test kitchen for the magazine. Staff members said they were hoping to stay in the Bay Area.

"We will be working together with the Sunset team on a thoughtful search for a new home for our operations after the New Year," Evelyn Webster told employees in a letter.

Time Inc. this year also sold the property near Birmingham, Ala., that housed the magazines Southern Living and Cooking Light to Samford University. Samford leased back part of the campus to Southern Progress, the Time Inc. company that publishes those magazines and others, including Sunset. Several Time Inc. media outlets have experienced sizable layoffs as Time Warner prepared to spin off Time Inc. as a separate publicly traded company.

Sunset began as a pamphlet of sorts in 1898 started by Southern Pacific Railroad executives who wanted to lure Easterners to the untamed West. The magazine went on to define the California lifestyle for aspirational newcomers looking to embrace the relaxed, open way people on the West Coast gardened, traveled and ate.

In the 1950s, the magazine moved into the new Cliff May campus in Menlo Park, which would become the site for pilgrimages by loyal readers. Many came for the Sunset Celebration Weekend, a community event that showcased Sunset’s food, wine and gardening interests. The event will be held one last time on the campus next summer.

Sunset staff members had long used the campus grounds and the grand dining areas and kitchen to produce a magazine that embraced local food before it was a cliché and that was respected among cooks for recipes that were tested by a cadre of home cooks who tried to replicate what food writers and chefs had developed. Editors there said they were proud that readers often told them new Sunset recipes were safe enough to try out at dinner parties because they would always work.

The magazine publishes different editions for regions in the West, and its recipes reflected subtle differences between Northern and Southern California cuisine as well as styles of eating that stretched into Washington and Hawaii. The gardens, too, were a reflection of its regional devotion, with parts sectioned off into zones so editors could determine which plants might work best in different states.

Staff members refused to comment for attribution out of concern for their jobs, but said the swiftness of the sale was a surprise and the loss of such a storied workplace a heartbreak. Still, it was not a surprise that Time Inc. was looking to sell a prized piece of real estate in one of the most expensive real estate markets in country; but how the magazine would fare in a new, less historical and beautiful environment was a concern.

Jerry Anne Di Vecchio, who worked at the magazine for 43 years and retired as senior food editor in 2001, said it would be hard for Sunset to retain its mantle "as a working voice of the West, without the tools for testing and experimenting."