Hearst Castle

Started: 2023-07-12 20:03:06

Submitted: 2023-07-13 18:07:25

Visibility: World-readable

Visiting the opulant hilltop resort of one of the last century's billionaires

Kiesa likes looking at houses, and there are no better houses than Hearst Castle, so we decided to take two tours of the castle, starting with the "Grand Rooms" tour ("recommended for first-time visitors", they said) and then heading back up the mountain to take the "Upstairs Suites" tour. It was unclear how much time I ought to allow between the timed tickets until I actually added multiple tour tickets in my cart at once, and then the website told me that I ought to allow two hours and two minutes between tours. This seemed very precise ("and two minutes") but was enough to figure out a proper tour spacing. (Several old articles said that one could stay on the top of the hill between tours, but this was no longer the case, due to post-pandemic staffing problems.)

Hearst Castle's Visitor's Center was a short drive from our campsite, north along Highway 1 along the central California coast, at the base of the golden hillside below the hilltop estate. We started with the short movie The Making of Hearst Castle, presenting the background of the castle with dramatic recreations of William Randolph Hearst's formitive Grand Tour and his partnership with architect Julia Morgan to build the estate. I was expecting a modest movie but this turned out to be a huge IMAX-sized screen, interspursed with (much-smaller-screen) home movies by Hearst with the guests at his estate, Hollywood A-list royalty of the 1920s and 1930s.

We ate lunch at the on-site cafe (which was servicable), then had some time before we needed to catch the bus. I looked through the museum galleries discussing Hearst's life, his origin as a child of privilage, the media empire he built, and the historic European artifacts he acquired. At the appointed time we joined the queue to ride the bus up the hill to the castle. As the road wound up the hill we caught glimpses of the buildings of the estate at the top of the golden hillside. At the visitor's center we were close to the ocean, cool but sunny; but as we climbed the hill the air grew warmer until it was a scorching 90°F. (A sign in the parking lot warned of a heat advisory, which was confusing in the 60°F cool, until the staff in the visitor's center pointed out that it was hot on top of the hill and we ought to bring water.)

The bus let us off at the top of the hill in front of series of dramatic stairways leading up to the Neptune Pool. Our tour group barely fit on the landing between one set of stairs (especially when we all tried to stand in the shade). Our guide led us to a large patio with a dramatic view of the ocean, 1600 feet below us; and then we crowded under the portico on the left side of the Neptune Pool.

On the hot summer day at the top of the hill, it seemed almost cruel to take us to see the Neptune Pool and then tell us we couldn't actually jump in the pool to cool off. (Our guide helpfully suggested two ways to actually swim in the pool: make friends with someone named Hearst, or make a large donation to the foundation that supports the castle.)

From the pool we climbed to another patio, surrounded by live oak trees. (Among the extravagances Hearst indulged in when building his estate was to move four mature oak trees by digging a large trench around the base, filling the trench with concrete, and slowly hoisting the concrete cylinder holding the root system out of the ground into a new location.) The patio gave a view of the Neptune Pool below us and two of the "guest cottages" beside us. These "guest cottages" were huge, 6000-square-foot edifices; but they were dwarfed by the main house.

Finally we reached the patio in front of the Grand House itself: a massive edifice meant to look like a cathedral in the center of a Spanish village, surrounded by the guest houses and other supporting buildings. Here we had shade to stand in, accompanied by misters in the trees, while our guide told us about the facade in front of us.

We snuck around the corner of the building to enter a side passage on our way to the great hall, skipping the main entry so we wouldn't walk over the priceless mosaic on the floor. This was the hall where Hearst would entertain his guests in the evening, before heading to dinner in the next room. There was so much going on in this room it was hard to take it all in: the grand fireplace in the center of the room, carved in stone and probably acquired from some grand building somewhere in Europe. The ceiling was carved wood, and elaborate (but faded) tapestries hung on the walls. The furniture was equally grand, set in the middle of the room but beyond the reach of where we were supposed to step, on the ugly industrial carpet laid out to form a path where we could walk without touching the wood floor or the carpets.

Our next stop was in the adjacent dining room, where Hearst held court at dinner. (He insisted that all of his guests eat dinner together, where he could talk to his guests and gain fodder for his newspapers. He sat his newest guests closer to his place at the middle of the table, with other guests being pushed further away the longer they stayed.) Here too the walls were covered in tapestries, and the ceiling was covered in wood paneling from some historic building in Europe.

We walked through several adjacent rooms, each spectacular in their own way. One had a wood ceiling that had been carefully restored to its original painted appearance, removing centuries of grime that had reduced it to a uniform brown; but the ceiling had been installed in a larger room so the builders had carefully replicated the ceiling around the edges, including the grime. We walked into the theater, where Hearst showed movies late at night. (Wikipedia tells me that the San Luis Obispo film festival showed Citizen Kane here in 2011, the first time the movie had been screened in the castle itself.)

After the theater we stepped back outside, past the tennis courts, and then into the Roman pool under the tennis court. Hearst insisted on building the pool under the tennis courts, even though the flat tennis courts would be difficult to perfectly waterproof, a decision that haunts the state parks to this day. (They are currently involved in a project to replace the cork ceiling above the pool, which gave the interior space more echo than it otherwise would have had.)

Where the Neptune pool at the beginning of the tour was an extravagant outdoor pool, the Roman pool was an opulant indoor pool, covered in blue-and-gold mosaic. (The tiny one-inch tiles we walked on had gold leaf perfectly positioned between layers of glass.) Skylights under the tennis courts illuminated a shallow section of the pool, forming the base of a T; the main body of the pool was a uniform 10 feet deep, though the water refracted the light to make it look like it was more shallow further away.

At the exit to the Roman baths there were tour buses waiting to take us back down the hill, reversing the fifteen-minute journey we took up the hill at the beginning of the tour.

Back at the visitor's center we had a few minutes to take a break and refill our water before catching the bus back up the hill for the "Upstairs Suites" tour.

This tour started on the opposite side of the Neptune Pool, giving us a view across the pool of the other tour group crowded under the collonade on the opposite side of the pool. From there we took a different route to a different entrance of the main building on the estate, giving an up-close view of the raw concrete left unfinished on the north wing of the building. The whole structure was built out of reinforced concrete, a relatively new building material when the estate was built starting in 1919. The concrete frame gave the building the strength it needed to support the interior rooms and survive for the last century, including a nearby 6.5-magnitude quake in the last decade.

This tour focused on the smaller guest rooms on the upper floors of the main building. We started in the "cloisters" on the south side of the building, a hallway with small guest rooms that was supposed to be open to the outdoors on the side, but the open windows had been filled in with glass to keep out winter storms. Each room was opulaently decorated and everything was basically overwhelming. (It didn't help that I was beginning to feel dehydrated from the heat at the top of the hill.)

After the cloisters we walked through several two-room guest suites, which were intended for married couples so each person could have their own bedroom, connected to a sitting room in the middle.

Our next stop was the library, which was the single word used in the description of this particular tour that led Kiesa to choose it above the other available tours. Hearst outfitted his library with books he hoped his guests would read, but the guests were generally more interested in the other activities at the estate. The shelves were lined with books and the whole thing was especially impressive.

During the tour, as I heard about all of the priceless historic works of art that Hearst pillaged from Europe to outfit his castle, I couldn't help but think of the recent Freakonomics Radio series Stealing Art Is Easy. Giving It Back Is Hard. The series focused on the colonial habit of pillaging works from other cultures, lead by the British Museum; but in this case the plunder came without most of the racism and colonialism featured in the Freakonomics examples. I wasn't sure what to think about the plunder in this case: did it matter that the Europeans were mostly plundering their own historic buildings and Hearst happened to buy the pieces?

Our guide pointed out one piece of art that had been returned: a painting whose provenance includes Nazi expropriation of a Jewish collection in the 1930s. The state park had a replica made, hung the replica on the wall, and returned the original.

Our tour continued in Hearst's own bedroom, and the adjacent bedroom of his mistress Marion Davies; and then into the gothic study, fitted with an apparently-ornamental wooden arched ceiling (the actual structure of the whole building was reinforced concrete, so I presume that the arch was only supporting itself) lined with more books. Here the state park staff had set out a couple of books from the collection that modern visitors would recogonize, including an early-twentith-century copy of A Christmas Carol.

Like a proper castle, or a more-modern folly, Hearst Castle was equipped with spiral staircases leading between the floors. Here the raw reinforced concrete structure was visible, along with the imprints of the wooden boards used to make the forms for the concrete. This seemed kind of out of place for a building decorated with antique finishings from across Europe, but I appreciated the opportunity to see the underlying structure of the building.

There were a couple of rooms that ought to have been on the tour but were excluded because they were too hot in the unventilated attic spaces to view. We had a slightly-more-leisurely walk through the remaining guest suites, including an unusual-for-the-estate guest room with a loft. We ended up in the Roman pool again, from the opposite side, giving us a different view of the pool and the refractory illusion changing the apparent depth of the pool.

We caught the bus back down to the visitor's center, catching one last glimpse of the castle from the road as we descended.

Kiesa wants to return to see all of the tours, so I have every expectation that we will visit Hearst Castle again.

No single blog post could hold all of the pictures I took at Hearst Castle. The rest are at Photos on 2023-07-01.