Castle Falls Short as a Home : Generation gap: Couple want to sell the mansion they built to house five generations of their family. Their children wanted places of their own.
When new boyfriends call on 24-year-old Casey Roberts at her family home in San Juan Capistrano, they frequently take one look at the giant house on the hill and keep driving.
“They get intimidated,” said her mother, Sharon, describing with amusement how her daughter runs down the brick driveway to assure dates that they are at the right address.
Without doubt, the 21,521-square-foot mansion on Hilltop Way called Mulberry Castle is an awesome sight. The design of the house, believed to be the largest ever built in South Orange County, reflects the architecture of an 18th-Century South Carolina plantation house, which in turn was an Americanized version of a 16th-Century French chateau.
With nine bedrooms, 11 bathrooms and a six-car garage, it was designed as a family compound to accommodate five generations. Each room has a panoramic view of hills and a faraway glimpse of Dana Point Harbor.
But Sharon and David Roberts’ three children, who were expected to share the home, have changed their minds, in part because they feel the house is too pretentious for their tastes, their parents say, but also because they have grown up and want to live independently.
So now the house, built with the children in mind, and the 3 1/2-acre hillside on which it sits are up for sale at an asking price of $6.9 million.
David Roberts, 46, who devoted five years of work and worry to the project, and even took up residence in a trailer to supervise the construction, says he is disheartened by his children’s choices.
“We thought it would be a dream to live here. But it is not their dream,” he said. “It kind of takes the wind out of everybody’s sail.”
Sharon Roberts said the project was simply ill-timed and should have been completed when their children were younger.
“We just did it too late for our family,” she said, noting that her daughters, both in their 20s, now are rarely home because they are busy working, attending college and socializing.
Besides, she said, the young women don’t like the image of opulence that the house conveys. The Robertses’ 26-year-old son Mark, his wife and their son have moved out of the house to an apartment in San Clemente.
With finishing touches being placed on the house and its landscaping, including weeping mulberry trees, rose gardens and an orchard of more than 200 fruit trees--the family faces the challenge of selling their unique creation in a recession-stricken real estate market.
All the floors of the house were made of brick to avoid the problem of children tracking dirt onto carpets. A rumpus room resembling a cozy cafe with a soft drink dispenser, pinball machine and posters of French impressionists’ artwork was added so the younger generation could entertain friends.
And an array of private living quarters was built around a 7,000-square-foot living room that features a 58-foot-long swimming pool, a banquet-size dining-room table and crystal chandeliers suspended from a 25-foot-high ceiling. The towering front doors to the house open through a castle-like turret.
By design, the house is bright indoors with the help of 100 French doors, 1,900 panes of glass and 19 mammoth skylights. When the family got quotes from window washers, the lowest was $600.
“So we decided to wash the windows ourselves,” Sharon Roberts said.
Another dominant feature of the house is the brickwork--70,000 square feet of it--covering the curving driveway and a massive back yard patio.
David Roberts figures that to find the right buyer--perhaps someone else looking for a large multifamily residence or a corporation seeking an executive retreat--he will have to advertise across the country and possibly abroad to places like Japan with a favorable currency exchange rate. His stepfather, Robert Sontag, a real estate broker, is handling the marketing.
The configuration of the house is not what everyone would want, Roberts says.
“When we built it, we didn’t think of selling it. I don’t know how you sell a compound,” Roberts said.
He said his stepfather, Sontag, got the idea that the whole family might live under one roof, five generations in all, ranging from Roberts’ 90-year-old grandfather to his own grandson.
There has been precedent for such close confines in this clan. For 10 years, Roberts and family lived next door to his stepfather and mother in San Clemente. Roberts’ grandfather, Maurice Colby, lived just two blocks away.
Moreover, family members had previously been in business together, operating auto-parts stores that they sold at a substantial profit in the late 1970s, Roberts said. Since then, they’ve been active real estate investors.
“We are just ordinary people who put three tract houses together and built this,” said Roberts’ mother, Marian Sontag, who on a recent afternoon was baking cookies for her great-grandson in her part of the house.
Sontag said that after Mulberry Castle is sold, she will probably live in a tract house once again. And the Roberts say their children will probably become renters.
“They would rather have a little place. They want less, as long as it is theirs,” their father said.
Sharon and David Roberts plan to buy a home in Paris. Someday they may build another house, they said. “But no more castles.”
Castle on a Hill
Mulberry Castle is among Orange County’s largest houses. The 21,512-square-foot residence has nine bedrooms, 11 baths, three laundry rooms and a swimming pool in its 7,000-square-foot living room.
How Much Room is 21,500 Square Feet? Enough to ...
Researched by DALLAS M. JACKSON / Los Angeles Times
