By Melanie Royals

As a decorative artist, I have had the great fortune to be able to travel to some of the most inspiring countries in Europe, including France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. The abundance of architectural treasures and decorative treatments that were created in these countries in centuries past keeps your mind spinning, camera clicking, and neck twisting,  as your “artisan” eyes keep capturing glimpses of design details that seem to adorn almost every surface. Elaborate painted ceilings, boiserie, trompe l’oeil, marquetry, mosaics, frescoes, and all other manner of amazing artisan craftsmanship are in such abundance that you are constantly asking yourself, “why, oh why don’t we have this in the United States?”

While it’s true that you are hard pressed to find this wealth of inspiration in most places in this country, there IS one magical place that you can go to experience the overwhelming grandeur of European design and craftsmanship: William Randolph Hearst’s legendary estate built on a hill overlooking California’s scenic central coast. At this site of a former rustic Hearst family camping retreat, Hearst and architect Julia Morgan collaborated for 28 years on the creation of La Cuesta Encantada, the “Enchanted Hill”. Hearst himself always referred to it simply as “the ranch”. We know it today as Hearst Castle.

Here, you will find a 165-room estate that is filled from floor to ceiling with “repurposed” architectural features culled from European churches, palaces, villas, and chateaus in Italy, Spain, and France. A trip to Hearst Castle is like a highly condensed mini-tour across the Mediterranean! I visited there for the first time upon moving to California from Pennsylvania back in 1979 and have been back several times since for another memorable look. It is truly one of the most beautiful and inspiring places I’ve ever been.

You can imagine how thrilling it is then, to say that my two decorative pattern companies, Royal Design Studio and Modello Designs, have recently been selected to become licensees of the Hearst Castle Collection. This designation means that we have the exclusive rights to develop designs and patterns from the vast Hearst Castle collection of European antiques, decorative art, and architectural inspiration. I have the honor of pulling our Hearst Castle Collection patterns from a wide range of surfaces at Hearst Castle. These include pillows, upholstery fabrics, metalwork, ornately carved ceilings, panels, friezes, decorative accessories, and architect Julia Morgan’s vast legacy of architectural drawings. We are very proud to joining other company licensees such as Pindler & Pindler, Tilevera, Barclay Butera, Enkeboll, and Castilian (to name a few), and to have the opportunity to help to promote the legacy and rich decorative history of this national treasure through our pattern designs and Hearst Castle sales and promotions. We will be releasing new designs from the Hearst Castle Collection of stencils and Modello masking patterns over the next few months, with a full release (hopefully!) debuting at the IDAL Convention in Norfolk, VA this coming July.

This past January, my husband Eric and I got a huge (and I mean HUGE) treat when we were invited up to Hearst Castle for a private, behind the scenes tour. We spent a very special day with Jeff Payne, Collections Registrar, touring the main house, Casa Grande, and the three incredible guest houses: Casa del Mar, Casa del Sol, and Casa del Monte. Hearst and his staff always referred to these three houses informally as house A, B, and C; a tradition that continues with the Parks and Recreation staff to this day.

The purpose of this multi-part article, then, is to excite you about the possibility of perhaps visiting Hearst Castle someday, and to share some of what we saw and learned there just in case you can’t!

First, a little history….

William Randolph Hearst

No doubt the name Hearst is familiar to you; vast publishing empire of newspapers and magazines. You may recall the infamous Patty Hearst and the SLA? More to the point, you may now receive and read some Hearst Corporation magazines: Veranda, House Beautiful, Country Living, and O, as in The Oprah Magazine, to name a few.

William Randolph Hearst, the son of millionaire mining engineer George Hearst, was the born in San Francisco in 1863. He began his path to controlling a vast publishing empire in 1887, when he took control of The San Francisco Chronicle, a newspaper that his father had purchased. By the mid-1920s he had a nation-wide string of 28 newspapers. He later expanded his interests to magazines and news wire services to the point of controlling the largest news and magazine business in the world.

Hearst developed his love of European art and architecture, which is now on full display at Hearst Castle,  during two “Grand Tours” of Europe with his mother Phoebe at the ages of 10 and 16. He cultivated his passion for acquiring them his whole life on annual trips abroad with visits to art dealers and auction galleries-and he had the funds to purchase at will!

Many of the treasures that fill Hearst Castle, though, were actually purchased at auctions in New York City though. After much of Europe was decimated by World War I, literally shiploads of treasures were stripped from remaining buildings. These were then sold off in America to help raise money to help rebuild cash-strapped, war-ravaged cities there. That tragedy is the main reason that you will find room after room of ornately carved and decorated centuries-old ceilings and wall panels cleverly retrofitted at Hearst Castle to look as if they have belonged there for centuries.

Julia Morgan-The Quiet Pioneer

For me, personally, the most interesting story associated with Hearst Castle is the story of the architect, Julia Morgan. Julia Morgan was a most amazingly educated, prolific,  and talented woman; a true trailblazer, and inspiration not only for the vast range of her talents and architectural designs, but also for the way she persevered to overcome the obstacles placed in her path as a professional woman of her time.

She was one of the first women to enroll at the University of California at Berkeley and chose the Civil Engineering Department as they did not have an architecture program at that time. She developed an early interest in architecture, specifically the Arts and Crafts style, which she studied informally at the home of Bernard Maybeck, an accomplished Bay Area architect in her last years at UC Berkeley. After becoming the first woman to graduate from that program, she moved to Paris. Her goal was to further her training by working at an architectural atelier, and to begin what would become a multi-year quest to become the first woman to be enrolled in the architecture program at the then all-male Ecole des Beaux-Arts program there. After being rejected twice from admission, even though her entrance exam results would easily have gained admission for a man, she was finally admitted and went on to become the first woman to receive a Masters Degree in Architecture from this famed school.

She returned to San Francisco and began an astoundingly productive career as an architect there. Her career flourished in the building boom that followed the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, as she pulled from her training in both the Arts and Crafts and classical styles. There were numerous commissions including the rebuilding of The Fairmont Hotel, and the private home of Hearst’s mother Phoebe in Pleasanton. In 1919 Hearst approached her to work with him on designing what would become known today as Hearst Castle-a project that would continue for 28 years and actually never really finish. While Hearst still had grand plans for the west wing of the main house, “Casa Grande”, construction at Hearst Castle ended finally in 1951 with Hearst’s death.

Amazingly, even though Morgan devoted 28 years of her life to her collaboration with William Randolph Hearst and the development and building of Hearst Castle from its inception, she was able to design and complete close to 700 unique and individual building projects over the course of her career. She was able to accomplish this by working with her staff at her office in San Francisco during the week, and making the trek by train and car up the hill to Hearst Castle each weekend to oversee the artisans and constructions crews that were working on-site.

During her career, Morgan’s primary goal was always to design structures that seemed to “grow from their surroundings”, and most importantly, to please her client. She had an amazing gift for design and detail, but did not strive to be “revolutionary” or “innovative” with her architecture as her more famous peers were doing during the modernist architectural movement. She simply created beautiful buildings.

Morgan died pretty much unheralded as an architect, and personally destroyed many of her own papers documenting her work when she closed her architectural office in the early 1950’s. Seemingly without much ego, Morgan avoided the limelight and shunned interviews. She preferred to let her work speak for itself, and once said, “My buildings will be my legacy…they will speak for me long after I am gone”.

Fortunately, her work, notes, and drawings related to the design of Hearst Castle are well documented, archived and preserved. And she was prolific! In fact, much of what you see at Hearst Castle was actually conceived and designed by Julia Morgan and created by artisans on site. While the main house is filled with true European art and architectural treasures, the architectural features of the three smaller houses were almost exclusively designed by Morgan (with seemingly endless input from Hearst himself) to imitate the Mediterranean style. She designed everything from the ornate ceilings, the bas relief plaster, ornately carved doors, tiles, metalwork, light fixtures, fire screens, and on down to the hinges and hardware.

I am looking forward to sharing more of Julie Morgan’s and William Randolph Hearst’s unique collaboration and vision with you in the next installment of this article.

To be continued….

To view more pictures that pertain to this article check out the gallery at: http://www.artisphereonline.com/2011/01/26/gallery/gallery-2/

Links:

http://www.hearstcastle.org/

http://www.friendsofhearstcastle.org/

http://www.neovenator.com/special/summer/morgan/morgan.html

http://www.notablebiographies.com/Gi-He/Hearst-William-Randolph.html

Old School:

Hearst Castle-The Biography of a Country House

Julia Morgan-Architect of Beauty