A Home Fit for a King : Don and Renee Brownstein’s castle is the antithesis of the typical Valley tract house.

Don Brownstein’s home is truly his castle.

Brownstein’s 7,800-square-foot house has everything a good castle should--towers and tur rets, high ceilings and stone floors, a courtyard with a fountain, a torture chamber (full of exercise equipment), even secret passages.

The moat will come later.

The gray stone-fronted house is easy to find; it’s the only castle on the block in this otherwise normal, middle-class neighborhood. The massive 300-pound wooden front door opens into a seemingly vast hall. To the left is the formal dining room, its antique table and sideboard illuminated by a 100-year-old chandelier.

To the right, a seven-foot-tall pencil sketch of a warrior battling a dragon decorates the wall where a winding wooden stairway leads to the second floor. Straight ahead, cathedral-like ceilings cover the hallway leading to the family room and kitchen. The 23-room house, with five bedrooms and seven bathrooms, is built around a central courtyard, complete with a lion’s-head stone fountain.

Brownstein and his wife, Renee, bought the 40-year-old house in 1981 for $260,000, but soon felt they and their two children were outgrowing its 2,600 square feet.

“It was either move or expand the house,” Brownstein explains. Since they liked the neighborhood, expansion won. Brownstein, who owns a rendering and recycling company in Vernon, has always been fascinated by medieval themes and castles. He decided to go for the dream.

The couple pored over picture books of castles and design magazines and visited luxury housing tracts to get ideas and to pick and choose amenities. “We took a lot of different design elements,” Brownstein says.

“We took a little bit from English castles, a little bit from German castles, and so on,” he says. Hearst’s Castle, for example, inspired them to build lofts with skinny spiral staircases in the children’s rooms.

There are little luxuries like the dumbwaiter that goes from the kitchen to the master bedroom and an upstairs laundry chute that handily dispatches the washables downstairs.

Whimsical touches abound. Gargoyle faces can be found in the molding in the family room, on outside turrets, even carved into the newel posts on the banister. And Rapunzel would feel right at home dangling her tresses from any of the several turrets.

Most fun are the secret passages, one that leads from a downstairs hallway to the master bedroom, another that snakes from another bedroom to the torture chamber, an exercise room painted with a mural of a realistic-looking snarling dog, chained prisoners and near-naked ladies brandishing whips. On the ceiling, a leering guard peers down through a painted hole. This is not a room for children or the fainthearted.

The kitchen may look old, with the stove set in a stone-covered arch, handmade antique glass in one cupboard and cabinets made from distressed wood. But the facade covers an indoor barbecue and a subzero refrigerator.

If this is an adult dream house, imagine how much fun kids must have! Although his children don’t say much about whether they like the house, “every time they bring a friend over, we hear them running around the house, playing hide and go seek or throwing water balloons from the turrets,” Brownstein says.

It’s not easy building a castle. The Brownsteins moved out of the house for the 1 1/2 years it took for the main construction. Because the structure, which Brownstein says has cost about $1.3 million “so far,” is so heavy, builders had to dig nearly 15 feet down to compact the soil for the foundation.

Brownstein says the neighbors haven’t voiced any complaints about the castle, although a few did wonder how big the house would be since “it just kept getting taller.”

Jack Hays, who has lived in the neighborhood 27 years, says, “We had a great time watching (the house) go up. Every day there was something new they were hauling in. The workmanship is spectacular--it’s one of a kind.”

“It’s a great landmark--I just say I live right by the castle,” adds Kathleen Lewan, who grew up in the neighborhood and returned to raise her children there.

And although the family has been living in the castle since April, Brownstein says there is still much to do before it’s done.

Yeah, like build that moat.