Last week we took a little road trip to southern California. The catalyst for this trip was the wedding of one of Steve’s close family friends in San Juan Capistrano, and we decided to make a road trip out of it and do some other stuff as well. Day 1 consisted mostly of driving, mostly. But to break up the seven-ish hour drive from the San Francisco Bay area of the Los Angeles area, we made a stop roughly midway at Hearst Castle in San Simeon.
I am sure I have driven through San Simeon at some point of my life, but I guess I never noticed it through the car window since I didn’t stop. It is pretty nice. Steve and I both noticed right away that the ocean is actually blue! As opposed to the stormy gray that we usually see in, say, San Francisco or Santa Cruz. Anyway, George Hearst apparently thought it was pretty nice too, since he bought a nearly 50,000 acre ranch (which eventually grew to over 250,000 acres) in 1865.
Speaking of George Hearst, when he was described on our tour, he did not resemble the George Hearst portrayed by Gerald McRaney on Deadwood even remotely. Now, I know Deadwood is fictionalized, but I don’t think they would have the guy chopping off fingers and ordering murders if he was the kind, giving humanitarian the good people at the castle suggest. But I digress.
It wasn’t George Hearst that built the castle, it was his son, William Randolf. Little Willie played on that land as a child, and in his 50s, after building his media empire, he built la cuesta encantada – the enchanted hill. Hearst built the castle over a 28-year period with the help of architect Julia Morgan. Morgan herself was something else. She was the first woman to graduate with a degree in architecture from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and designed over 700 buildings in California throughout her career. Photo of Hearst and Morgan, below, from Wikipedia.
Our tour started with a bus ride up a long and winding road to the top of the hill on which the castle sits. We got some amazing views of the ocean, the hills, and animals that are descendants of the ones that used to reside in Hearst’s private zoo. I can’t remember exactly what kind of animals we saw, but we did not see zebras, which the place is famous for.
We met our guide at the top. He led us to the main facade of la casa grande and laid out the ground rules, which were: (1) stay on the tour mats and (2) don’t touch anything.
Once we entered the house, our first stop was the Assembly Room, which is where Hearst and his guests would gather for cocktails before dinner. It appears I did not take a picture of this room as a whole. I’m sure you can find one online if you are interested. My best description is lots of fancy paneling and mouldings, tapestries all over the walls, fancy furniture, statues, and really nowhere for the eye to rest. In other words, busy. What I did take a picture of was the antique church choir stalls used as paneling on the lower walls.
Next we headed to the Refectory, or dining room. This I did get a picture of, though it’s a bit blurry because it was pretty dark in there. The room is pretty Gothic-inspired. You can see the tell-tale pointed arch windows at the top of the wall at the end of the room. The chairs, though, are Dante chairs from the Renaissance period, evident in the interlocking X shape of the legs.
My favorite part of this room was a carved wood statue of the Madonna and Child because it demonstrates the “Gothic sway” that was common in depictions of Mary and Jesus during that period. It’s the gentle s-curve created in her body by holding the child on her hip.
We pressed on to the Billiard Room. This room contained the most expensive piece of art in Hearst’s collection, a tapestry previously owned by Catherine de Medici. It reminded me immediately of a series of early Flemish renaissance tapestries called The Hunt of the Unicorn. The foliage is extremely detailed, the figures are pretty flat looking, and the horizon line is very high in the background – it’s pre-Brunelleschi and linear perspective. Turns out it is a Flemish tapestry circa 1500. Score 1 for school.
You might also notice the suspended light fixture smack in the middle of the photo. Our tour guide mentioned that Hearst gave specific instructions that all light fixtures were to display the beauty of the incandescent bulb. I guess at the time it was a big deal to have your whole house lit with electric bulbs.
The next room was uninteresting, except for the guy who decided he didn’t want to stay on the tour mat. And after several requests from the guide and the security guard in the room, he decided to step onto an antique rug instead of back on the mat, which set off an alarm. Good times.
Our final stop was the theater, where we viewed some silent movies of Hearst and his guests at the castle. This room featured caryatids, which are columns carved to look like women, up and down the room, and holding the room’s light fixtures (again, notice the exposed incandescent bulbs?).
Once we finished the tour proper, our guide released us to roam the expansive grounds. The views are incredible and the pools are amazing. Here we are at the outdoor Neptune Pool.
The structures are actually pieces of ancient Roman temples Hearst imported. They weren’t hard to find because the Romans were prolific builders. They had perfected the art of building with slow-drying concrete and veneering with marble (as opposed to the Greeks, who built with solid marble), so they saved lots of time and money that way.
Of course, Hearst needed an indoor pool as well: the Roman Pool. It may be hard to appreciate in these photos, but the entire inside of the pool is made up of small mosaic tiles. I cannot imagine the hours of work that must have gone into it.
Also, check out the ladders in and out of the pool. They are solid marble. Not the skimpy plastic and metal you and I are used to, huh?
Here’s was I didn’t like about the tour. We took the Grand Rooms tour, which is the one recommended for first time visitors. For your $25 entrance fee, you get to see a whopping five rooms. That’s right, five. Did I mention there are 136 rooms in the house? So you get to see less than 4 percent of it. For $25 more dollars, you can see four more rooms on the Upstairs Suites tour. And for yet $25 more dollars you can see four more rooms on the Cottages and Kitchens tour. And there is no discount for doing all the tours in one day even though you are only taking one bus ride to the top of the hill instead of three. Contrast that with tours of another wild estate built by a crazy rich person, the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, which takes you through 110 of the 160 rooms on the basic mansion tour for $30. Talk about a bigger bang for your buck.
Finally, W.R. Hearst’s mother was apparently the major benefactor of the University of California at Berkeley at the time, so our docent made a number of shameless digs at Stanford, which is seriously not cool. If you got into Cal and Stanford, where would you go? That’s what I thought.
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