The house has been appraised, perhaps conservatively, at $85 million. There are 27 rooms in the main house, including six bedrooms for the family and three small bedrooms for servants. The entire structure is of concrete, including the walls, floors and ceilings finished in a variety of fine woods, and the exterior is clad in a veneer of Indiana limestone three inches thick. Huguette's mother, Anna, built Bellosguardo in 1933 in an 18th-century French style with Georgian influences, a sturdy chateau. The Italian villa here was damaged in the 1925 Santa Barbara earthquake, though it stood long enough for Huguette Clark to be married here in 1928. Her father bought this property in 1923, for a price said to be $300,000 in cash, or about $4 million in today's dollars. She lived her last 20 years in a simple hospital room, dying in 2011, during the Obama administration, two weeks short of her 105th birthday. A shy artist, she rarely left her New York apartments but had a circle of friends whom she kept in touch with mostly on the telephone. His daughter, born in Paris in 1906 while her father was in the Senate battling Teddy Roosevelt's environmental reforms, inherited one-fifth of his fortune. William Andrews Clark (1839-1925), one of the copper kings of Montana, a railroad builder, founder of Las Vegas, and one of the richest men of the Gilded Age. Huguette (pronounced "oo-GET") Marcelle Clark was the youngest child of Sen. These photos were made for her estate in 2011 after she died. A 1933 Cadillac V-16 seven-passenger limousine with golden goddess hood ornament inside the carriage house at Bellosguardo, the Huguette Clark estate in Santa Barbara, California. Inside the great house, there is a touch of the eccentric: In Huguette's dressing room, the covered chairs come in two sizes: full-sized ones for adults, and tiny, half-height chairs for her collection of French and Japanese dolls.Īnd out in the whitewashed carriage house, automobiles sit unused: a 1933 Chrysler Royal Eight convertible and an enormous black 1933 Cadillac seven-passenger limousine, both with California plates dated 1949. As we arrive, a fox is at work by the reflecting pool and the grove of 80-year-old orange trees, hunting in the sun for lizards. The only residents during these decades have been the estate manager, his dogs, and a tame family of foxes. Up close, Bellosguardo appears to be in pristine condition. Though the property has 1,000 feet of frontage on the water, and the view of the ocean is stunning, Bellosguardo is so well hidden by trees that one has to fly over the property to get a look at it. The 23-acre property, with a 21,666-square-foot French mansion high on a mesa above Santa Barbara's East Beach, has been the subject of legend here for decades. Gallery: Take a Tour of Huguette Clark's Empty Mansion, Bellosguardo He’d been here before, on Huguette's invitation a decade ago, as we described in our book about the Clark family, "Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune." I was accompanied by Huguette's cousin, Paul Clark Newell, Jr. She is believed to have last visited in about 1953. This weekend the estate administrators allowed me to be the first journalist to report on a tour of Bellosguardo, one of the empty estates owned by Huguette Clark, the reclusive heiress to a copper fortune that at one time rivaled that of the Rockefellers.
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