January 6, 2010 • 17 mins
When newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst grew weary of camping, he asked Julia Morgan to build a 'small bungalow' in San Simeon, California. More than 20 years later, the gigantic Hearst Castle remains one of the most opulent homes in North America.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And today we're
going to start with some of the best opening lines
for a pole. It's from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan
(00:23):
in Santa Do to Kubla Khan, a stately pleasure dome
decree where alf the Sacred River ran through caverns measure
list man down to a sunless sea. And while Coleridge
may have been high on opium while he wrote this,
Zanna Do was a real place. It was the summer
castle of Kubla Khan, which Marco Polo visited, but it
was also a fictional pleasure palace that you might know
(00:46):
as Charles Foster Kane's house in Citizen Kane. And while
Orson Wells's version of Sannah Do was compiled from exterior
shots of a castle in New York and surrealist Matt paintings,
it was meant to be William Randolph Hurst's La Cuista
and Cantata, or the Enchanted Hill, which is high above
California's specific coast, and Hearst lovingly called it the ranch.
(01:11):
It's sometimes called San Simeon, which is also the town
where it's located, but we know it best as Hearst Castle.
So where did this castle come from? Well, William Randolph
Hurst's father, George Hurst, purchased Rancho Piedros Blancas in eighteen
sixty five. It had been part of the Mexican Land
Grant of eighteen forty, and he later bought the adjoining
(01:33):
ranchos Santa Rosa and San Simeon. So when William was
in kind of this his middle age, he inherited this
enormous estate by this point from his mother. It's two
hundred and fifty thousand acres and um. By nineteen nineteen
he starts construction, which is the same year that he's
kind of making his first forays into the movie business,
(01:56):
trying to promote the career of his twenty two year
old mistress, Marion Dave These. So this is his entry
to Hollywood. And the land was originally known as Camp
Hill and had been a place for the family to
go on camping trips, you know, Mrs Hurst and the boys.
Although it's not my kind of a camping trip, it's
a little cushier. They've got separate sleeping and dining tents,
(02:16):
which actually is my idea of camping. That sounds love like,
that's pretty comfortable. But Hurst once more than that. Yeah,
he spends instructions to his architect, Julian Morrigan in nineteen nineteen,
Miss Morgan, we are tired of camping out in the
open at the ranch in San Simeon, and I would
like to build a little something. That's a major understatement,
but she spends the next twenty eight years working on
(02:39):
the project, which by seven is a complex of one
hundred and sixty five rooms and one hundred and twenty
seven acres of gardens, terraces, pools, and walkways. So before
we get into the house, we should talk about the
woman who spent twenty eight years of her life working
on this project, right, And Julie Morgan is a pretty
(03:00):
interesting person. She was born in eighteen seventy two in
San Francisco at a little, small, sickly child, but she
sneaked into her brother's gym and exercised, and she was
very well educated by her well to do parents. As
a teen, she spent the summer with her New York relatives,
and that's when she first discovered her love of architecture
when she visited the office of Pierre Lebroun, who was
(03:21):
her cousin's husband. She likes the drawing, she likes the designs,
and she thinks, hey, maybe that could be for me. Yeah.
So she attends UC Berkeley and studies civil engineering, and
her senior year she meets Bernard maybeck Um, who, by
the way, is an interesting character himself. He wore Greek
robes and had a waste long beard. But after graduation
(03:47):
she studies architecture with him privately, and by eighteen ninety
six she goes to Paris and starts preparing for exams
to enter the Ecole de boz arts Um. She has
to take the test a few times um most people do,
but she ends up being the first woman enrolled in
their architecture section and graduates in nineteen o two. And
(04:09):
she took a lot of trips in Europe while she
was there to study classical architecture, and she wanted to
sketch a lot of these gorgeous buildings because she couldn't
always afford the books she needed. Yeah, so she really
learns a lot about classical architecture, and she returns to
California and becomes the first woman again uh to be
(04:31):
granted an architect's license in the state. Go Julia Yeah
and her. She eventually establishes her own practice, and it
really takes off after the San Francisco earthquake of nineteen
o six. For one thing, you can imagine there are
a lot of buildings that need to be rebuilt, but
also some of her earlier designs had weathered pretty well.
She had been using reinforced concrete, so it wasn't all
(04:55):
um crumbled from the earthquake, right. And her connection to
the hers starts with Phoebe Hurst, who's really involved in
the YWS. This is William Randolph hurts mother, right, And
it's not like she was just working on the Hearst
Castle during this twenty eight years. We want to make
that clear because she's also working with other clients and
on other projects for the Hearsts, like the Hacienda in California,
(05:18):
wind Tune fairy Tale Houses in Northern California's so pretty
Google image that one. There's a Hopie residence of the
Grand Canyon Um. She does the Los Angeles Examiner Building,
several of William Randolph Herst, Beverly Hills Residences and Marian
Davies Beach House in Santa Monica. But yeah, like like
we said, she's also got other clients. So when Hurst
(05:39):
eventually loses a lot of his money later in life,
it's not like she's out of work. She's got a
successful business side. She was a smart cookie. But we
we wanted we're here to talk about her most famous project,
which is the Hearst Castle. So Hurst was really into
collecting art and antiquities, and it's something that had appealed
(06:01):
to him ever since he visited Europe with his mother
at age ten. He been interested in art history. So
whatever he built, it wasn't just going to be a
little something like he sent in that telegram to Morgan.
It was gonna be a museum for his art and
statutory tapestries and pottery, and also a place to display
(06:24):
these architectural elements that he had accumulated. And this is
big stuff. It's not it's not little pictures to hang
on the wall. Now we're talking entire ceilings, ceilings and
doors and even temples. So he's got to have a
place to integrate all of the things that he's collected,
and Sarah had found a really cool New York Times
(06:44):
article that called his home cinematic because it's not arranged
as a whole. There's not one huge idea that all
of the rooms sort of play into. It's more like
you walk into one room and it's Gothic, and you
walk into the next room and it's very Renaissance. So
more like a series of vignettes. And it's um that
makes sense when you consider he's building it to house
(07:08):
his collections and to display them, so he's got all
this different stuff. It's going to end up looking very diverse.
But let's talk about the biggest part of the house,
which is the main house, La Cassa Grande, sixty tho
square feet and it's built in a Mediterranean Revival style. Yeah,
as are the three guest homes, which are called cottages,
(07:30):
and that must be very ironic because they're each mansions
in their own right. But the Casa Grande has thirty
eight bedrooms in forty one bathrooms, and it's probably most
distinctive feature is the Spanish towers, like a Spanish cathedral.
It's you can see it up on the on the
hillside when you drive by, and there are even rooms
(07:52):
in the towers, the hexagonal celestial suites as they're known.
One was a favorite of Clark Gable and Carol Lombard,
and they could take up to these eighteen huge bells
above them, which I think might be kind of terrifying,
were wonderful. Um. A lot of the rooms had the
antique cofford ceilings, like we were talking about, Oriental carpets
(08:13):
and the colorful tapestry hangings on wood paneled walls, and um.
A lot of the decorative elements originated from Spain or Italy,
which played into that Mediterranean revival theme. Hurst was trying to.
I don't think he was a big fan of the
Spanish mission style, UM, but he wanted to stay true
(08:35):
to the California look and not you know, not go
completely off course. UM. But every week railroad cars would
come in with different things. It wasn't all just from
Spain or Italy. He would have, UM, Flemish tapestries and
antique French furniture as well as the Roman temple fragments
and the ceilings from Italian monasteries. UM. So all of
(08:58):
the even just imagine and trucks coming up the hill
with just overflowing luxuries. But despite this ornate setting in
this ornate building that he had, he maintained a surprisingly
casual atmosphere. He really liked this idea of it being
a ranch. So you know, the refectory table, which is
(09:19):
in this lovely gorgeous room that looks like it should
be in a monastery, is set with paper napkins and
bottled ketchup. Yeah, like it's a campsite. And he has
this really impressive collection of ancient Greek pottery, some of
it is from eight hundred BC, and it's arranged among
his books like you or I would put little knickknacks
(09:42):
like postcards or something on our bookshelves. It's not it's
not set up like a museum now, but it is
this gorgeous setting and it's perfect for entertaining. And Hurst
entertained a lot of people, including some of the shining
star names Lionel and John Barrymore, Harley Chaplin, Gary Cooper, Clark, Gable,
Greta Garbo, Carrie Grant, and Harpo Marx. And probably his
(10:06):
most famous guest was Winston Churchill. And by the time
Churchill was visiting. Hurst and his wife Millicent were estranged.
She was tired of him carrying on this very open
affair with Marion Davies and had moved to New York.
But she she made sure to come home when when
Churchill was visiting and entertained as as the lady of
(10:29):
the house. I was too, but usually it was Davies
who was entertaining with Hurst, and they had very elaborate
costume parties, including one of the big ones was called
the Circus Party, and that was for William Randolph hurst
seventy five birthday, and Betty Davis came as a bearded lady,
which sounds pretty like a pretty devoted costume. We do love.
(10:49):
We can appreciate that. Um. He also has a huge
wine cellar. You would think that that a lot of
these parties would be very alcohol fueled, but surprisingly they weren't.
He was not a big drinker himself. And even though
he does have this impressive wine seller which Morgan designs,
so it's in compartment, so it's fireproof and theft proof,
(11:10):
and he's he's really concerned about theft, by the way,
with his with his wine celler, he holds the key
even his Butler complains that you have to really order
ahead of time because you have to get the master
of the house to to get the wine out for you.
But there were ways to get around it. If you
were David Niven, the English actor who you might know
from The Pink Panther. He got in trouble once for
(11:33):
bringing in his own liquor and tossing his empties under
his bed, which of course was the bed formerly owned
by Cardinal reach Lee. But there was a lot to
do with the castle. Besides, drink Hurst would actually kick
people out sometimes if they were too inebriated. But we're
going to go over some of the most famous features.
Probably the castle's most famous feature of all is the
(11:56):
Neptune Pool. There are actually three pools that were built
on site, each successively larger than the last. Because the
initial plan was just a little ornamental pool. But in
Hurst wrote to Julia Morgan and said, I am sending
back the plan of the Temple Garden with the suggestion
that we make the pool longer than it is, as
long as a swimming pool. Mrs Hurst and the children
(12:17):
are extremely anxious to have a swimming pool, so the
second version sounds pretty awesome, has a cascade and statues
of Neptune in an aread um. But the present version,
which was built in nineteen thirty four to thirty six,
is pretty amazing. It's a hundred and four ft long
(12:37):
fifty eight feet wide, and it holds three and forty
five thousand gallons of water. And that's not the only
cool thing about it. There's also this oil burning heating system,
which Sarah and I liked because it sounds at the
same time both so modern and so old fashioned. It
sounds very quaint oil burning, but um nice to have
a heated pool too, it exactly and picture lots of
(13:00):
Vermont marble and four seventeenth century Italian bas reliefs on
the sides of the colonnades. Yeah, and of course there's
a whole temple thod on one side of the pool.
And if you don't want to look at that, if
you get tired of the gorgeous temple, you can turn
around in the pool and look at a beautiful view
of the Pacific. Or if you're more of an indoor swimmer,
(13:22):
if the sun is not shining in California, you could
change locations and go to the indoor Roman pool, which
is also huge one thousand, six hundred and sixty five
square feet, and there are eight statues of Roman gods,
goddesses and heroes. They're lifeguards watching, but not entirely as helpful.
It was probably styled after ancient Roman baths, like the
(13:45):
baths of caracalla Um in the mosaics were inspired by
fifth century mausoleum in Ravenna. And this is our very,
very favorite part of all. It has a traditional marine
monster theme and I'm thinking about changing my bathrooms with
love to have a marine monster theme in my bathroom.
So great. It's decorated floor to ceiling with mosaic tiles,
(14:06):
some of them are colored, some of them fused gold inside,
and the designs are created by a well known muralist,
Kneel Salon. But if swimming is not what you're up to,
there's also a zoo, and the zoo at various points
had antelope, zebras, camels, llamas, kangaroos, ostriches, EMUs, barbary sheep,
(14:28):
Alaskan bighorn sheep. Katie. You want to pick it up? Yeah,
there are more. We're not done, musk oxen, yaks, giraffes,
black bears, grizzly bears, Which bears best, Sarah Lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, cougars,
chimpanzees orangutangs, monkeys, macaws, can't use swans, storks and an
(14:49):
elephant just to round out the cast, so Hers kept
a vet on staff, as you would have to if
you had all these animals. Most of them, or at
least the grazing type, just kind of went around in enclosures,
but there were you know, he didn't let the bears
roam their property and like eat Charlie Chaplin or something.
But by nineteen thirty seven he started losing a lot
(15:12):
of money and dismantled his zoo. He I think he
sold most of them to zoo like public zoos or
private collections. But there's still a few animals left, including zebras.
Hers castle is famous for um the occasional zebra that
strolls by, and if you don't feel like driving to
go see those zebras, you could land at the airport,
(15:36):
which some very famous people like Sir Charles Kingford Smith,
Howard Hughes, Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh flew into visit
so Herst died in nineteen fifty one, just shortly after
this project is officially completed. UM in nineteen fifty eight,
his heirs gave a hundred and thirty seven acres of
(15:56):
the holdings, including the castle, to the State of California
and you as the her San Simeon Historical Monument. And
today you can go and tour the castle. I actually
really recommend visiting UM the Castle's official site, and you
can do three sixty degree tours and to pick through
all the rooms. It's really cool. It gives you a
good sense of how you install a ceiling from an
(16:19):
Italian monastery into your own home. I had so many
questions for Sarah about that, like, no, really, once you
buy a ceiling, where do you put it? I'd like
someone to answer that for me. But it makes sense
that they transferred this to the state, just as Zanna
do and Citizen Kane shows signs of decay by the
By the end of the story, you can imagine it
(16:40):
would cost a fortune to maintain a home like this privately. Exactly.
So that is the story of Hearst Castle. And this
was a listeners suggestion for which we think too. If
you have ideas, feel free to email us at History
podcast at how step works dot com, and if you'd
like to read more about some adulously wealthy residence is
go to our homepage and search for top ten most
(17:03):
expensive houses at www dot how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com and be sure to check
out the stuff you missed in History Class blog on
the how stuff works dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And today we're
going to start with some of the best opening lines
for a pole. It's from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan
(00:23):
in Santa Do to Kubla Khan, a stately pleasure dome
decree where alf the Sacred River ran through caverns measure
list man down to a sunless sea. And while Coleridge
may have been high on opium while he wrote this,
Zanna Do was a real place. It was the summer
castle of Kubla Khan, which Marco Polo visited, but it
was also a fictional pleasure palace that you might know
(00:46):
as Charles Foster Kane's house in Citizen Kane. And while
Orson Wells's version of Sannah Do was compiled from exterior
shots of a castle in New York and surrealist Matt paintings,
it was meant to be William Randolph Hurst's La Cuista
and Cantata, or the Enchanted Hill, which is high above
California's specific coast, and Hearst lovingly called it the ranch.
(01:11):
It's sometimes called San Simeon, which is also the town
where it's located, but we know it best as Hearst Castle.
So where did this castle come from? Well, William Randolph
Hurst's father, George Hurst, purchased Rancho Piedros Blancas in eighteen
sixty five. It had been part of the Mexican Land
Grant of eighteen forty, and he later bought the adjoining
(01:33):
ranchos Santa Rosa and San Simeon. So when William was
in kind of this his middle age, he inherited this
enormous estate by this point from his mother. It's two
hundred and fifty thousand acres and um. By nineteen nineteen
he starts construction, which is the same year that he's
kind of making his first forays into the movie business,
(01:56):
trying to promote the career of his twenty two year
old mistress, Marion Dave These. So this is his entry
to Hollywood. And the land was originally known as Camp
Hill and had been a place for the family to
go on camping trips, you know, Mrs Hurst and the boys.
Although it's not my kind of a camping trip, it's
a little cushier. They've got separate sleeping and dining tents,
(02:16):
which actually is my idea of camping. That sounds love like,
that's pretty comfortable. But Hurst once more than that. Yeah,
he spends instructions to his architect, Julian Morrigan in nineteen nineteen,
Miss Morgan, we are tired of camping out in the
open at the ranch in San Simeon, and I would
like to build a little something. That's a major understatement,
but she spends the next twenty eight years working on
(02:39):
the project, which by seven is a complex of one
hundred and sixty five rooms and one hundred and twenty
seven acres of gardens, terraces, pools, and walkways. So before
we get into the house, we should talk about the
woman who spent twenty eight years of her life working
on this project, right, And Julie Morgan is a pretty
(03:00):
interesting person. She was born in eighteen seventy two in
San Francisco at a little, small, sickly child, but she
sneaked into her brother's gym and exercised, and she was
very well educated by her well to do parents. As
a teen, she spent the summer with her New York relatives,
and that's when she first discovered her love of architecture
when she visited the office of Pierre Lebroun, who was
(03:21):
her cousin's husband. She likes the drawing, she likes the designs,
and she thinks, hey, maybe that could be for me. Yeah.
So she attends UC Berkeley and studies civil engineering, and
her senior year she meets Bernard maybeck Um, who, by
the way, is an interesting character himself. He wore Greek
robes and had a waste long beard. But after graduation
(03:47):
she studies architecture with him privately, and by eighteen ninety
six she goes to Paris and starts preparing for exams
to enter the Ecole de boz arts Um. She has
to take the test a few times um most people do,
but she ends up being the first woman enrolled in
their architecture section and graduates in nineteen o two. And
(04:09):
she took a lot of trips in Europe while she
was there to study classical architecture, and she wanted to
sketch a lot of these gorgeous buildings because she couldn't
always afford the books she needed. Yeah, so she really
learns a lot about classical architecture, and she returns to
California and becomes the first woman again uh to be
(04:31):
granted an architect's license in the state. Go Julia Yeah
and her. She eventually establishes her own practice, and it
really takes off after the San Francisco earthquake of nineteen
o six. For one thing, you can imagine there are
a lot of buildings that need to be rebuilt, but
also some of her earlier designs had weathered pretty well.
She had been using reinforced concrete, so it wasn't all
(04:55):
um crumbled from the earthquake, right. And her connection to
the hers starts with Phoebe Hurst, who's really involved in
the YWS. This is William Randolph hurts mother, right, And
it's not like she was just working on the Hearst
Castle during this twenty eight years. We want to make
that clear because she's also working with other clients and
on other projects for the Hearsts, like the Hacienda in California,
(05:18):
wind Tune fairy Tale Houses in Northern California's so pretty
Google image that one. There's a Hopie residence of the
Grand Canyon Um. She does the Los Angeles Examiner Building,
several of William Randolph Herst, Beverly Hills Residences and Marian
Davies Beach House in Santa Monica. But yeah, like like
we said, she's also got other clients. So when Hurst
(05:39):
eventually loses a lot of his money later in life,
it's not like she's out of work. She's got a
successful business side. She was a smart cookie. But we
we wanted we're here to talk about her most famous project,
which is the Hearst Castle. So Hurst was really into
collecting art and antiquities, and it's something that had appealed
(06:01):
to him ever since he visited Europe with his mother
at age ten. He been interested in art history. So
whatever he built, it wasn't just going to be a
little something like he sent in that telegram to Morgan.
It was gonna be a museum for his art and
statutory tapestries and pottery, and also a place to display
(06:24):
these architectural elements that he had accumulated. And this is
big stuff. It's not it's not little pictures to hang
on the wall. Now we're talking entire ceilings, ceilings and
doors and even temples. So he's got to have a
place to integrate all of the things that he's collected,
and Sarah had found a really cool New York Times
(06:44):
article that called his home cinematic because it's not arranged
as a whole. There's not one huge idea that all
of the rooms sort of play into. It's more like
you walk into one room and it's Gothic, and you
walk into the next room and it's very Renaissance. So
more like a series of vignettes. And it's um that
makes sense when you consider he's building it to house
(07:08):
his collections and to display them, so he's got all
this different stuff. It's going to end up looking very diverse.
But let's talk about the biggest part of the house,
which is the main house, La Cassa Grande, sixty tho
square feet and it's built in a Mediterranean Revival style. Yeah,
as are the three guest homes, which are called cottages,
(07:30):
and that must be very ironic because they're each mansions
in their own right. But the Casa Grande has thirty
eight bedrooms in forty one bathrooms, and it's probably most
distinctive feature is the Spanish towers, like a Spanish cathedral.
It's you can see it up on the on the
hillside when you drive by, and there are even rooms
(07:52):
in the towers, the hexagonal celestial suites as they're known.
One was a favorite of Clark Gable and Carol Lombard,
and they could take up to these eighteen huge bells
above them, which I think might be kind of terrifying,
were wonderful. Um. A lot of the rooms had the
antique cofford ceilings, like we were talking about, Oriental carpets
(08:13):
and the colorful tapestry hangings on wood paneled walls, and um.
A lot of the decorative elements originated from Spain or Italy,
which played into that Mediterranean revival theme. Hurst was trying to.
I don't think he was a big fan of the
Spanish mission style, UM, but he wanted to stay true
(08:35):
to the California look and not you know, not go
completely off course. UM. But every week railroad cars would
come in with different things. It wasn't all just from
Spain or Italy. He would have, UM, Flemish tapestries and
antique French furniture as well as the Roman temple fragments
and the ceilings from Italian monasteries. UM. So all of
(08:58):
the even just imagine and trucks coming up the hill
with just overflowing luxuries. But despite this ornate setting in
this ornate building that he had, he maintained a surprisingly
casual atmosphere. He really liked this idea of it being
a ranch. So you know, the refectory table, which is
(09:19):
in this lovely gorgeous room that looks like it should
be in a monastery, is set with paper napkins and
bottled ketchup. Yeah, like it's a campsite. And he has
this really impressive collection of ancient Greek pottery, some of
it is from eight hundred BC, and it's arranged among
his books like you or I would put little knickknacks
(09:42):
like postcards or something on our bookshelves. It's not it's
not set up like a museum now, but it is
this gorgeous setting and it's perfect for entertaining. And Hurst
entertained a lot of people, including some of the shining
star names Lionel and John Barrymore, Harley Chaplin, Gary Cooper, Clark, Gable,
Greta Garbo, Carrie Grant, and Harpo Marx. And probably his
(10:06):
most famous guest was Winston Churchill. And by the time
Churchill was visiting. Hurst and his wife Millicent were estranged.
She was tired of him carrying on this very open
affair with Marion Davies and had moved to New York.
But she she made sure to come home when when
Churchill was visiting and entertained as as the lady of
(10:29):
the house. I was too, but usually it was Davies
who was entertaining with Hurst, and they had very elaborate
costume parties, including one of the big ones was called
the Circus Party, and that was for William Randolph hurst
seventy five birthday, and Betty Davis came as a bearded lady,
which sounds pretty like a pretty devoted costume. We do love.
(10:49):
We can appreciate that. Um. He also has a huge
wine cellar. You would think that that a lot of
these parties would be very alcohol fueled, but surprisingly they weren't.
He was not a big drinker himself. And even though
he does have this impressive wine seller which Morgan designs,
so it's in compartment, so it's fireproof and theft proof,
(11:10):
and he's he's really concerned about theft, by the way,
with his with his wine celler, he holds the key
even his Butler complains that you have to really order
ahead of time because you have to get the master
of the house to to get the wine out for you.
But there were ways to get around it. If you
were David Niven, the English actor who you might know
from The Pink Panther. He got in trouble once for
(11:33):
bringing in his own liquor and tossing his empties under
his bed, which of course was the bed formerly owned
by Cardinal reach Lee. But there was a lot to
do with the castle. Besides, drink Hurst would actually kick
people out sometimes if they were too inebriated. But we're
going to go over some of the most famous features.
Probably the castle's most famous feature of all is the
(11:56):
Neptune Pool. There are actually three pools that were built
on site, each successively larger than the last. Because the
initial plan was just a little ornamental pool. But in
Hurst wrote to Julia Morgan and said, I am sending
back the plan of the Temple Garden with the suggestion
that we make the pool longer than it is, as
long as a swimming pool. Mrs Hurst and the children
(12:17):
are extremely anxious to have a swimming pool, so the
second version sounds pretty awesome, has a cascade and statues
of Neptune in an aread um. But the present version,
which was built in nineteen thirty four to thirty six,
is pretty amazing. It's a hundred and four ft long
(12:37):
fifty eight feet wide, and it holds three and forty
five thousand gallons of water. And that's not the only
cool thing about it. There's also this oil burning heating system,
which Sarah and I liked because it sounds at the
same time both so modern and so old fashioned. It
sounds very quaint oil burning, but um nice to have
a heated pool too, it exactly and picture lots of
(13:00):
Vermont marble and four seventeenth century Italian bas reliefs on
the sides of the colonnades. Yeah, and of course there's
a whole temple thod on one side of the pool.
And if you don't want to look at that, if
you get tired of the gorgeous temple, you can turn
around in the pool and look at a beautiful view
of the Pacific. Or if you're more of an indoor swimmer,
(13:22):
if the sun is not shining in California, you could
change locations and go to the indoor Roman pool, which
is also huge one thousand, six hundred and sixty five
square feet, and there are eight statues of Roman gods,
goddesses and heroes. They're lifeguards watching, but not entirely as helpful.
It was probably styled after ancient Roman baths, like the
(13:45):
baths of caracalla Um in the mosaics were inspired by
fifth century mausoleum in Ravenna. And this is our very,
very favorite part of all. It has a traditional marine
monster theme and I'm thinking about changing my bathrooms with
love to have a marine monster theme in my bathroom.
So great. It's decorated floor to ceiling with mosaic tiles,
(14:06):
some of them are colored, some of them fused gold inside,
and the designs are created by a well known muralist,
Kneel Salon. But if swimming is not what you're up to,
there's also a zoo, and the zoo at various points
had antelope, zebras, camels, llamas, kangaroos, ostriches, EMUs, barbary sheep,
(14:28):
Alaskan bighorn sheep. Katie. You want to pick it up? Yeah,
there are more. We're not done, musk oxen, yaks, giraffes,
black bears, grizzly bears, Which bears best, Sarah Lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, cougars,
chimpanzees orangutangs, monkeys, macaws, can't use swans, storks and an
(14:49):
elephant just to round out the cast, so Hers kept
a vet on staff, as you would have to if
you had all these animals. Most of them, or at
least the grazing type, just kind of went around in enclosures,
but there were you know, he didn't let the bears
roam their property and like eat Charlie Chaplin or something.
But by nineteen thirty seven he started losing a lot
(15:12):
of money and dismantled his zoo. He I think he
sold most of them to zoo like public zoos or
private collections. But there's still a few animals left, including zebras.
Hers castle is famous for um the occasional zebra that
strolls by, and if you don't feel like driving to
go see those zebras, you could land at the airport,
(15:36):
which some very famous people like Sir Charles Kingford Smith,
Howard Hughes, Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh flew into visit
so Herst died in nineteen fifty one, just shortly after
this project is officially completed. UM in nineteen fifty eight,
his heirs gave a hundred and thirty seven acres of
(15:56):
the holdings, including the castle, to the State of California
and you as the her San Simeon Historical Monument. And
today you can go and tour the castle. I actually
really recommend visiting UM the Castle's official site, and you
can do three sixty degree tours and to pick through
all the rooms. It's really cool. It gives you a
good sense of how you install a ceiling from an
(16:19):
Italian monastery into your own home. I had so many
questions for Sarah about that, like, no, really, once you
buy a ceiling, where do you put it? I'd like
someone to answer that for me. But it makes sense
that they transferred this to the state, just as Zanna
do and Citizen Kane shows signs of decay by the
By the end of the story, you can imagine it
(16:40):
would cost a fortune to maintain a home like this privately. Exactly.
So that is the story of Hearst Castle. And this
was a listeners suggestion for which we think too. If
you have ideas, feel free to email us at History
podcast at how step works dot com, and if you'd
like to read more about some adulously wealthy residence is
go to our homepage and search for top ten most
(17:03):
expensive houses at www dot how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com and be sure to check
out the stuff you missed in History Class blog on
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