ROYAL TREATMENT : For Some Southland Homeowners, Their Home <i> Is</i> Their Castle
Don Brownstein feels like the king of his block. When he turns into the driveway of his Northridge home, he usually finds the street clogged with cars full of gawking picture-takers.
Passersby stare because Brownstein lives in a recently completed, 7,800-square-foot medieval castle.
“You only live once,” Brownstein said, “so we wanted to build something we love. And I’ve always had a fascination with things that are medieval and strange.”
A castle in Southern California? It seems a hopelessly odd mix--an ancient building designed for military defense plunked down in a city protected by electronic security alarms. Castle owners may be out of step in the land of youth, surfing and instant mini-malls, but they care not. Eschewing trendy high-tech styles, equipped with large budgets or small, local castle owners create medieval fortresses where they are shielded from the bustle of urban life.
Brownstein and his wife, Renee, had always been interested in ancient architecture. After a search for larger quarters yielded nothing located closer to Brownstein’s Vernon-based recycling business, the couple decided to start from scratch on their existing lot and build a one-of-a-kind castle. They even found a way to recycle their original, 2,600-square-foot house--instead of tearing it down, they donated it to charity.
Their new three-story home has classic castle features, including a 300-pound wooden front door, battlements and hidden passageways, as well as Brownstein’s whimsical “physical jokes”--two-way mirrors, carved figures tucked into every corner and a torture chamber/workout room adorned with realistic paintings of whip-wielding taskmasters and snarling dogs.
New materials were often used to create the appearance of age. Concrete and stucco, painted to look like old stone, were used for the entryway flagstones and some interior and exterior walls. The Brownsteins were influenced by castles they saw in Europe, as well as Hearst Castle and Disneyland. “We’d be on the Haunted Mansion ride admiring the wall sconces,” Brownstein said. The result is “a vaguely European feeling without being any particular style.”
“There are faces in the balusters, jokers and dragons, gargoyles on the outside parapets,” Brownstein said. To complete the look, Brownstein is having a fire-breathing bronze dragon sculpture installed to guard his front yard, which will eventually include a moat.
But dragons aside, what the family really enjoys about the house is the sense of privacy, of being away from the modern world. While their children Erin, 11, and Adam, 14, frolic with playmates in the hidden passageways, Brownstein can hole up in his office or work out in the torture chamber. “What I like is I can go up into my own area and not be bothered,” Brownstein said. “It’s peaceful and quiet. It’s just a fantasy house.”
Hollywood castle owner Chuck Friedman feels the same way about his 18-year-old, two-story medieval home.
“We live a fairy tale here,” he said of the 6,000-square-foot castle he built gradually, as finances allowed. The final design includes two main living areas surrounded by battlements, waterfalls, a winding moat and drawbridges. At one point the property also housed horses in suitably ancient-looking stables.
“Every year we added something,” he said. “It was ad-libbed. There was no architect.”
For Friedman, the castle motif was actually his second choice, selected after he learned that building codes prohibited construction of a ship-shaped home in the style of a Spanish galleon. Friedman decided a hilltop castle would be the next best thing. Back then, the area was more rustic, he recalled: “You could take your horse, go out the back door and go seven miles without hitting a house.”
More recently, Friedman’s castle has been the setting for many Hollywood movies and television shows, as well as charity events, including Halloween costume parties and sword-fighting demonstrations. “I’ve never yet had someone have a bad time here,” Friedman said. “The house takes on a lot of beautiful atmospheres, particularly if it’s a foggy night.”
Atmosphere--an air of sophistication, actually--was what early Southern Californians sought when they built ornate European-style castles, many of which have not survived. Hollywood historian Marc Wanamaker said the years 1910 to 1930 saw construction of many of the grandest castles. Two of the most impressive were within sight of each other: Castle Sans Souci, owned by Dr. A. G. Schloesser, and Castle Glengarry, which stood at Franklin Avenue and Argyle and was owned by actor Sessue Hayakawa.
“There was a lot of interest in Europe,” Wananmaker said, “particularly in people who moved here from back East and the Midwest. They’d seen how the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers lived, and they wanted houses with that royal, noble feeling. It was a way of showing you had culture.”
A few of those early castles are still standing, but have fallen on hard times. A 1927 castle on Peck Avenue in Point Fermin was subdivided into apartments before World War II. An 8,600-square-foot 1920 castle built by farmer Sylvester Dupuy, which still stands on Grandview Avenue in Alhambra, was also subdivided and fell into disrepair. In 1985, an American businessman based in Hong Kong bought it and announced plans to spend $500,000 to restore it. But it seems he underestimated the extent of the castle’s dilapidation, for the property’s ownership has now reverted to the mortgage holder, Bank of Hong Kong.
In the exclusive Orange Country community of Cowan Heights, a half-built castle became a modern-day ruin amid luxury estates, and eventually was leveled without ever being completed. One mysterious castle, almost completely hidden in the hills near Laurel Canyon Boulevard, has bars on the windows and a tarp covering the roof. The reclusive original owner, Hjalmer Lindquist, made the papers when he died in 1962 and a will was found leaving the property to two neighbor ladies--to whom he had never spoken until asking them for help on the day he died.
Many castle dwellers share Lindquist’s passion for privacy, preferring to place their battlements alone and undisturbed. Among the castles whose owners beg anonymity are Malibu Castle, a prominent Malibu landmark visible from Pacific Coast Highway near Webb Way; the French-style Wolf’s Lair, visible from Chuck Friedman’s castle in the Hollywood Hills, and the immense, 22,000-square-foot Rock Castle in Gardena. Despite living in exceedingly ostentatious surroundings, these castle owners insist they are really very quiet people who crave no publicity, please.
The love of privacy goes double for castle-owning celebrities. Don’t even think about disturbing Madonna at her recently purchased home, Towerhill Castle in the Hollywood Hills, built by John DeLario and the site of many movie shoots.
And famed palimony-lawsuit filer Marvin Mitchelson is now the owner of Castle Kalmia on Sweetzer Avenue. His home is better know as the Castle of the Fairy Lady because of the generosity of the original owner, philanthropist Hersee Moody Carson, who used to open the castle for disadvantaged children to visit on the holidays in the 1930s and ‘40s.
While all castle owners share a dream of living a medieval lifestyle, one actually located her castle through a dream of sorts. In 1947, newly divorced Illinois resident Ethel Mills Bartholomew, had “a kind of vision that there was a castle out there for her,” her son Dennis recalled. Mrs. Bartholomew lived in San Francisco and then in San Diego before finding her modest two-bedroom castle in Santa Monica.
Built in 1928, the pink stucco castle features an entryway turret and a secluded, tiny moat and drawbridge, which face an inner courtyard hidden from the street. She hired artists to paint vines and flowers in the kitchen and dining room, and lived there until her death in 1985.
Dennis Bartholomew had intended to retire to the castle, which he lived in for just two years before taking a job in Sacramento. But he has now married and is looking for larger quarters. So the castle is going up for sale, along with the property’s back yard apartment building.
Perhaps Bartholomew should take inspiration from Robert Bond and Nancy Oliva. In 1986, they bought what they describe as a “rundown piece-of-junk 1,400-square-foot house” and remodeled it into an authentic, 11th-Century Scottish castle more than four times larger.
A financial planner, Bond began formulating his castle-building strategy in 1974, and even used it as a classroom example of how to achieve long-term goals. After finding and purchasing the perfect corner lot in the Valley and amassing three large boxes of information on low-cost and energy-saving materials, products and designs, the couple lived on-site during the two-year construction. “There was a plastic sheet for the east wall,” Bond recalled. “People could have walked in at any time of the day or night!”
But Bond and Oliva think the energy-efficient result was well worth the hardships endured. “This is a happy castle,” Bond said. “There’s no dungeon. It’s part playhouse, part treehouse. We’re romantics.” The couple held their wedding in the castle, complete with period music, dress, food--and a castle-shaped cake. Oliva and Bond have also held numerous concerts and charity fund-raisers at the castle, which has excellent acoustics.
“Every day when I came home, for years,” Oliva said, “I’d take a tour around the house. It’s not coming home to a house--it’s coming home to an experience.”
They’ve adorned the castle with authentic period herbs, and enjoy the view of the garden from their turret bedroom--or dorter, in Scottish castle lingo. Even the bathrooms--er, garderobes --keep with the castle theme; they feature towels labeled “Her Royal Highness” and “His Majesty.”
“On Sunday mornings we stretch out toe-to-toe on the window seat in the grand hall, read the paper and look at the trees, which are all flowering,” Oliva said. “People who visit breathe a sigh of relief because it’s just so peaceful here.”
Despite their enjoyment of the castle, Oliva and Bond are considering a move to Raleigh, N.C. They plan to put their castle up for sale in June, 1994. “I fulfilled this dream,” Bond said. “Now we’ll simplify our lives and let someone else enjoy the beauty of this place.”
