California Splendor

Book excerpt: A luxurious presentation in all-new photography of the most splendid estates and mansions of the Golden State. California Splendor, a lavish, beautifully produced, large-format volume, presents iconic California houses dating from the Leland Stanford Mansion in Sacramento of 1857 to publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst’s palatial castle in San Simeon, completed after decades of construction in 1947. The book is comprehensive in its treatment, presenting to the reader a rediscovery and fresh exploration of the state’s great architectural offerings and showcasing the very best, in styles ranging from Spanish Colonial Revival, English Revival, and Mission Revival to Adobe, Monterey Colonial, and Italianate Victorian. Lovingly featured are such magnificent homes as the Arts and Crafts masterpiece of architects Charles and Henry Greene—the Gamble House—a work of subtle refinement and mysterious charm built for a Cincinnati businessman who longed for warm summer breezes and the fragrance of orange blossoms. The reader also finds here the extraordinary Filoli House and Garden, the Henry Huntington Mansion, the Spreckels Mansion, Casa del Herrero, and Carolands, to name only a few. More potent and powerful in our imagination than any one house is the dream, the aspiration to happiness and grandeur embodied by them all—a dream brought down to earth and to which we have been invited in California Splendor.