Hearst Castle — A Castle Mansion in California
San Simeon, CA
On the shores of the sun-drenched California town of San Simeon could be the castle mansion to end all castle mansions, Hearst Castle! Sitting on the La Cuesta Encantada (The Enchanted Hill), the entire Hearst Castle estate encompasses a total of over 90,000 square feet including outlying buildings, Hearst’s Victorian childhood home, 3 guest houses: Casa del Mar, Casa del Sol, and Case del Monte, and the 57,000 square foot main house appropriately named La Casa Grande. The grounds used to be half the size of Rhode Island at a mind-numbing 270,000 acres but is now a much more manageable 127 acres. The main complex is built in the Mediterranean Revival style and the views! On one side, Hearst Castle looks out onto the Pacific Ocean and towards the horizon beyond. And on the other side, there are views of the Central California hills and mountains. That’s like hitting the vista payload!
Hearst Castle Estate
The main mansion, La Casa Grande, can only be described as luxurious. There’s the assembly room where guests await luxuriously as they decide what to do for the day. The dining room isn’t called a mere dining room, it’s called the Refectory built to resemble a medieval castle’s Great Hall. There’s a theater, which knowing this house had its heyday in the 1920s and ’30s makes it all the more remarkable. The library is in there too that holds only a fraction of the 100,000 books in the estate’s collection as well as a billiard room — a prerequisite in Gilded Age mega-homes, and a massive book-lined Gothic Study. Hearst Castle has thirty eight bedrooms, forty two bathrooms, and the latest in technology for the time like electricity and running water. And it wasn’t built with off-the-shelf parts. The palaces, churches, and mega homes of Europe were plundered to build the interior of this California mega palace. La Casa Grande has antique ceilings with the one in the master bedroom dating back to the year 1300 and another one in the Refectory from Christopher Columbus’ time. There are also walls lined with Flemish tapestries, a fireplace in the refectory from the 16th century, and columns dating all the way back to ancient Rome!
Anyone would be proud to have the three guest houses (actually called “cottages”) as their home in their own right. The guesthouses, named after the views each guesthouse gives of the sea, sun, and mountains, are built in the same Mediterranean Revival Style and are only modest compared to Casa Grande. The 5,350 square foot Casa Del Mar is the biggest with Casa del Sol at 3,620 sq. ft. and Casa del Monte at “just” 2,550 sq. ft.
The main feature of Hearst Castle that sends jaws dropping would have to be the pools. The indoor Roman pool is absolutely breathtaking and built to resemble a Roman bath. The tiled interior (each tile has gold inside!) glistens amidst the water creating a surreal effect combined with the Roman statuary, made of Vermont Marble and carved by Italian artist Carlo Freter. Outside, the Neptune Pool is no less breathtaking. Surrounded by Roman style architecture and more statuary made of what else Vermont marble, the Olympic sized Neptune Pool looks out onto the sea in totally decadent luxury. Fun fact: Christopher Columbus’ flagship The Santa María can fit on the waters of the Neptune Pool!
Media Empire
Hearst Castle belonged to newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. The property had been passed onto him by his father, New York Senator George Hearst, and as his fortune grew, so did the size of the San Simeon estate. Hearst also grew his media empire. Part of the what was called the “yellow press,” his newspapers like the New York Journal and San Francisco Examiner blared out headlines from coast to coast. At the height of his empire, a quarter of the American people read Hearst’s newspapers giving inspiration to the character Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles’ movie Citizen Kane. “People will think, what I tell them to think,” Kane famously said in the movie.
Hearst’s media empire extended to the movies producing pictures like Perils of Pauline and When Knighthood was in Flower. When Knighthood was in Flower also starred Hearst’s companion Marion Davies, a young twenty something starlet at the time and he … much older than she. His wife, Millicent, only spent one magical Christmas at La Casa Grande and then moved out east to New York the rest of her life. She did birth five sons for William with the controversial Patty Hearst calling one of the Hearst sons, Randolph, as her father.
Hearst Castle was a social hotspot for society’s elite during its heyday. Hollywood mainstays like Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, and Greta Garbo visited the Castle during that time and so did Winston Churchill, President Coolidge who famously said “The business of America is business,” Howard Hughes, and Charles Lindbergh. Days were carefree as guests enjoyed the grounds swimming in the pools, hiking, or riding horseback along the coast. By night-time, guests had to go back to La Casa Grande to enjoy dinner in the Refectory, which for all its grandeur had regular condiments like bottled ketchup and mustard and paper napkins on the 48-seat antique banquet table as a reminder of the Enchanted Hill’s campground days.
Priceless Artifacts
And then as now, guests could marvel at the priceless artifacts at Hearst Castle. Hearst not only brought architecture from the Old World but also priceless items. The castle has vases from ancient Greece, mosaics from the days of Rome, statues from ancient Egypt, tapestries from medieval times, chests from medieval Spain, bas-reliefs from Renaissance Europe, and Tiffany lamps from the not-so-distant past. All were shipped to the remote town of San Simeon. They couldn’t even show everything to tourists. Hidden away, there are priceless alabaster jars and Persian rugs too fragile to be displayed.
Today, Hearst Castle is now a California state park garnering almost a million visitors every year and one of the most popular tourist attractions in California, this in the state that’s home to the Golden Gate Bridge and Hollywood. The Hearsts had donated the property to the state back in the 1950s and in business, the Hearst media empire continues to this day. In New York, the Hearst Tower rises 46 stories making sure the Hearst name continues to influence media in the 21st century.
