The Mansion is a work of full-blown Victorian pretensions.

The Los Angeles area friends of the California League of Conservation Voters went to the mountains north of Moorpark on Sunday to break the monotony of what one member described as the “wild rice and granola” events that the environmental organization had grown accustomed to.

“We decided to do something a little upscale and different,” she said.

So they packed caviar sandwiches and scones with clotted cream for 200 and drove to Piru for the day. In an offbeat way, Piru is upscale and different.

Piru is a town about a mile off the highway east of Filmore. It looks like one of the blue-highways towns of the West. It has a brick-facade main street with a couple of general stores, a barbershop with a real barber’s chair and a few homes of half-hearted Victorian pretensions.

And it has The Mansion.

The Mansion is a work of full-blown Victorian pretensions.

Its gleaming white exterior is ornamented with elaborate eaves and cornices, a three-story stone tower, stained glass windows and a green slate roof. The mansion stands amid a garden of orange trees, hibiscus, bird of paradise, lawns, statuary and fountains.

Its detail is astonishing. A brass rail around the house is fastened to stone posts with brass lions’ heads and is decorated with foot-tall brass sea horses, copies of the symbols of Venetian gondoliers.

The Mansion is the home of Scott and Ruth Newhall. Newhall is the heir to the Newhall Land and Farm Co. and publisher of the Newhall Signal (the same Scott Newhall whose lavish Victorian prose was described earlier this week in these pages by columnist Al Martinez).

Several times a year, the Newhalls open their home for charity events. The people from the League of Conservation Voters each paid $30, of which the organization kept everything but the cost of food.

The setting worked well for the league, even though the group is more involved in the politics of clean air and water than in the preservation of Victorian mansions, its president, Dorothy Green, said.

“Part of environmental quality is maintaining the beauty of things like this,” she said.

The Mansion is an excellent place to learn how that should be done.

When the first two dozen guests arrived at 2 p.m., a large bell rang out and an energetic woman in a blue bonnet and high heels announced the beginning of the first tour.

“I’m Ruth Newhall,” she said when the 15 people were inside her living room.

She held up a piece of cardboard on which several photographs were pasted. Some showed the house as built in the 1880s by David C. Cook, a Methodist from Illinois who was seeking a good climate for his health.

“This is about 1900,” she said. “This is in 1910. This is in 1980. We bought the house in 1968.”

Newer photos, in color, showed the house burning down.

“This is the fire that took place Feb. 18, 1981,” she said. “And, when the fire got through burning, there was just a hole in the ground. We had all the debris of our 48 years of married life at that point, and it was a lot--83 great big Dumpsters to load up the stuff and haul it away.”

For the next 30 minutes Ruth Newhall poured out the minute and touching details of the reconstruction of a lost Victorian house.

The secret, she said, was the quality of the workmen. Using photographs of stained-glass windows, tiles, Victorian lamps and extensive woodwork, they made exact replicas of everything.

The key craftsman was a woodworker from Savannah, Ga. named Bud. He stayed on the property in a trailer until the job was done, she said.

She did not mention what it cost. Evidently that was no problem.

At one juncture she pointed out an engraving in the front door window. It consisted of two mermaids framing a large letter “I” with a small “n” on its left and a small “s” on its right. That was the insignia of the Newhalls’ Irrawaddy Steamship and Navigation Co.

“People out in front reading see it as “sin” and they wonder what we’re going to use this house for,” she said.

Upstairs, in the master bedroom, the Newhalls’ sly humor took full bloom.

There, above the bed, they have installed a large painting of the Newhall mansion burning to the ground with dogs and firemen running in all directions.

And the bed itself was a story. It began when Scott Newhall bought a paddlewheel boat in Europe and sailed it home himself.

“I met him at Trinidad at Christmastime,” Ruth Newhall said. There, in an antique store, they found four hardwood bedposts they loved.

“And we were lucky because most times you find things like that when you are traveling and how are you going to get them home. But he had a boat. So he said, ‘We’ll just lash them on deck,’ which he did, and they had a storm off the coast of Mexico and one of them washed overboard, so we had a three-poster. We had the three posts in the basement so they didn’t burn up. And, when Bud saw them after the fire, he said, well, he would replace the one. He would copy it and make a head- and footboard and remake our bed for us. And so he did.”

As the tour emerged on a balcony and descended a spiral brass stairway, Scott Newhall and several generations of the Newhall family were mixing amiably with the friends of the environment.

He was soft-spoken and sincere. He hinted that not everything in the Piru Mansion should be taken at face value. The Irrawaddy Steamship and Navigation Co, for instance.

“It’s all kind of an old family fantasy,” he said. “There’s always a little Irrawaddy Steamship and Navigation Co. in everybody’s life.”

Yes, for a day anyway.