Hearst's Ranch

Well I must confess to great surprise.

I had expected William Randolph Hearst's "castle" at San Simeon to be a pompous and overblown demonstration of garish wealth combining with no taste.

Instead I think the opposite applied, the Ranch as he referred to it, is most certainly excessive in terms of the spend to create it (400 million is the modern day estimate), and the labour involved (an army of workers beavering away furiously for years to build it), but it is actually an incredibly pleasant place to be.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearst_Castle

It is certainly a bit of a hodge-podge in mixing up architectural styles, but the overall effect is very satisfying. It is, if you like, a magpie's castle. Hearst, we found out, represented one quarter of America's European Art Market while alive. That is he spent one in every four US dollars used to purchase European treasures. So he already had the wooden ceiling for the main lounge of his home, it was from some early European dynasty. And he had his architect design the house around these treasures.

This would have been a most vexxing project to try and build the house from a grab bag of stuff, none of which necessarily related to the other. Therefore each room is themed and the styles change between rooms.

One amazing story is that Hearst wasn't happy with the Renaissance ceiling of his dining room and required the architect to attach it so it could be easily replaced when he found the right one at a later date!

We could have stayed there for hours, and the prospect of being able to swim in either of the extraordinary pools will become a dream from now on.

Hudsie