A Collector’s Country House: William Randolph Hearst at San Simeon

A Collector’s Country House: William Randolph Hearst

When Winston Churchill visited William Randolph Hearst’s estate at San Simeon during Churchill’s 1929 California tour, he was pleasantly surprised. Though he had been expecting “a Monte Carlo casino perched atop the Rock of Gibraltar,” he found instead a stunning country house and an intriguing host. Hearst was an art collector in the 18th-century English tradition. Like William Beckford and Horace Walpole, Hearst personally selected every object in his vast collection, and determined its location. For 28 years, Julia Morgan—the first female architect to gain worldwide prominence—worked right beside him creating La Cuesta Encantada (The Enchanted Hill), as it was formally known.

At San Simeon, Hearst blended English country house traditions with Californian informalities. Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, and all the Hollywood set rubbed elbows with Calvin Coolidge and Bernard Shaw. Presiding as hostess was Hearst’s companion, the actress Marion Davies. The end result was a quintessentially American country house with English style gardens: built by a media mogul, designed by a woman architect, presided over by a Hollywood starlet, and forever immortalized by a film—Orson Welles’s brooding Citizen Kane. Victoria Kastner will discuss Hearst’s extensive art collection—Renaissance tapestries, Mediterranean furniture, English silver, and architectural fragments galore—and provide lively anecdotes about the hilltop, in this examination of America’s most glamorous country house and estate.