The Royal Treatment
Just in time for the 113th Tournament of Roses Parade, the stately Tournament House in Pasadena, onetime residence of chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. and current headquarters of the parade’s organizers, is blooming anew, after a major two-year renovation of its interior.
Work on the 22-room mansion, one of the few original estates left on what was once dubbed Millionaires’ Row on South Orange Grove Boulevard, is complete, though public tours won’t resume until February.
From ceiling moldings to baseboards, everything has been meticulously retooled to bring back the grandeur of the early 20th century estates that once served as winter homes for the country’s preeminent industrialists from the Midwest and East Coast.
The project was conceived of and funded by the Tournament of Roses Assn., a private nonprofit organization that is supported by revenue from the broadcast rights to the Rose Bowl football game, among other sources. More than 900 volunteers work year-round planning the gigantic parade that has been a New Year’s Day mainstay since 1890.
The organization launched the renovation in 1999, with a series of meetings among local designers and contractors. The construction and redecorating began in 2000 with the second-floor renovation, which took one year to complete. The ground-floor restoration was completed in September.
To spruce up the 18,500-square-foot home, the association’s design committee asked the Pasadena chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers to volunteer their services.
Seventeen of the society’s designers were selected to each tackle a room in the gigantic estate. They used photographs of several of the rooms’ interiors to re-create the opulent feel of early-1900s Pasadena.
“This renovation was important because the house has symbolic value here,” said Lois Mahar, the project’s manager. “I drive by at night and think, ‘It’s like the Statue of Liberty.’”
When Pasadena inherited the mansion for use as the Tournament of Roses headquarters in 1958--the year Wrigley’s widow, Ada, died--all of the furnishings had been removed. Over the years, the house had been decorated, one room at a time, resulting in the loss of its original, elegant look, said Libby Wright, tournament executive committee vice president and chairwoman of the design committee.
Original hardwood floors, made of 12-inch planks, had been covered with carpet, the wall paint had deteriorated and the kitchen, which today serves as a catering center for about 80 events a year, was woefully outdated.
“In 1962, they tried to fix the house but didn’t do it right,” Mahar said. “We had to bring the whole project up to code.”
The Wrigley mansion, as it is best known, was designed by prolific architect G. Lawrence Stimson in 1906 and built by his father, George W. Stimson, a prominent local builder. The younger Stimson designed the house for his parents.
By the time the concrete-and-steel-reinforced structure was completed in 1914, Stimson’s parents no longer wanted to live in such a large, opulent estate, so they sold it to the Wrigleys for $170,000.
In 1915, Wrigley paid $25,000 for the property adjacent to the mansion, razed the house on it and created a spectacular garden there, which today boasts 1,500 varieties of roses. The garden also is home to the estate’s famous Moreton bay fig tree and the Freedom Tree, a Mela leuca linariifolia, commonly known as “Snow in Summer.”
By some estimates, the home, situated on 41/2 acres, is worth up to $15 million today, according to area real estate agents. The association declined to reveal the cost of the renovation.
“People don’t live in houses like that anymore,” said Maggie Navarro, a longtime agent with Coldwell Banker in Pasadena. “Of the few of these homes that are left, the value is in the land, not the structure. The land is worth millions.”
Land and the mild climate brought wealthy business owners and industrialists to Pasadena in the late 1800s.
Among the prominent families who took up residence on South Orange Grove were the Libbys, of the Libby McNeil & Libby canned-food fortune. The 1905 Arthur A. Libby house was one of the last of the grand homes to be demolished, in 1968.
Edward Stephen Harkness, a businessman, philanthropist and heir to the Standard Oil fortune, also set up house on Orange Grove, which boasted the greatest concentration of wealth in western America, according to Kirk Myers, assistant archivist at the Pasadena Historical Museum.
The first Rose Parade was staged in 1890 by members of Pasadena’s exclusive Valley Hunt Club to showcase the mild winter weather in California. About 2,000 people turned out on New Year’s Day that year to watch a parade of flower-covered carriages.
By the time of the Great Depression, many of the mansion owners could no longer afford to keep their staffs of 30 or more servants, nor could they keep up the maintenance on estates that in many cases occupied several city blocks. The homes slid into disrepair and, by the ‘50s, most of the great mansions had been razed and replaced by apartment buildings and condominium complexes.
Legend has it that Ada Wrigley so enjoyed watching the Rose Parade from her home that she instructed her heirs to donate the mansion as the permanent home of the Tournament of Roses. Work on the house had been done sporadically, until now.
Despite the organizational challenge of such a large-scale undertaking, the Wrigley house renovation actually went quite smoothly, according to Max Dial, lead contractor on the project.
“The house was built extraordinarily well,” Dial said. “It has withstood the test of time.”
Swing open the carved, 4-inch-thick front door, made of Honduran mahogany, and the first thing a visitor notices is the new foyer. Alabaster lighting fixtures have replaced the small crystal chandeliers that used to grace the entryway, and the restored marble floor is now partly covered by a handmade rug.
The Aeolian-Skinner player organ, installed by the Wrigleys in 1915, still stands in the foyer and is in working order.
The dining room is the only room that contains the Wrigleys’ own furniture. The hand-carved Italian dining table and 12 chairs, among other pieces, were shipped to the mansion from the Wrigley House on Catalina Island. An 1899 oil painting of Joan Hadenfeldt Woodbury, 1907’s rose queen, has been restored and hangs on a dining room wall.
Of special note is the refurbished library, where the raised paneling above the marble fireplace and the wainscoting features carved monkey pod, a species of acacia found in Hawaii. An ornate, molded-plaster ceiling--known in architectural circles as a Stimson ceiling--also graces the room.
Just off the library is the spruced-up “Eisenhower bathroom,” so-called because the former president--who served as grand marshal of the 1964 Rose Parade--became trapped in the small restroom when a sliding door stuck during a cocktail reception. Party noises drowned out his pounding on the door, but eventually he was rescued.
The solarium, just off the library, originally was built as an open garden balcony. It is now enclosed, and a new custom-built bar has been installed in the room, along with an etched mirror. The Wrigleys’ original antique Chinese wallpaper still hangs on the walls, valued at about $500 per panel.
The second floor of the mansion, which used to contain five bedrooms and four bathrooms, now is used for Tournament of Roses purposes. Rooms are devoted to displays of past Rose Bowl games, parade grand marshals and association presidents, and others serve as spaces for meetings.
The Queen and Court Room, where the parade queen and her court dress before the extravaganza, has been freshly decorated with vertically striped wallpaper in contrasting shades of green.
To the surprise of the contractors and designers, a fully functioning, hidden bathroom was discovered upstairs during the remodel. It had been covered by wood panels and painted over years ago but now has been redecorated to reflect the style of the era in which it was built.
“Stimson was ahead of his time when he built this mansion,” said Tim Gregory, author of “The Building Biographer.” “The house was less ornamented for that day, when huge Victorians were the style. The Wrigley house was considered rather modern.”
To most Pasadena residents, the house represents not only a link to a bygone era, but a symbol of the best the city has to offer today.
“The mansion is home to the Rose Parade, so it represents the joy brought not only to the people in this city but in the world,” said Paige Parrish, a Pasadena attorney and member of the Tournament of Roses Assn. “You can’t put a price on that.”
