The Dark and Twisted Tale of an Heiress's California Dream Palace
Plus: The real source of Hotels.com's issues.
Carolands is an oversized, anachronistic wonder, a physical manifestation of morality tales about money, ego, and time–conveniently located near the new-age titans of industry in the Bay Area. Built by a Chicago heiress to rule over the inchoate West Coast high society, it was one of the last Gilded Age palaces. Designed a century ago by the architect of choice in Paris, Ernest Sanson, its 98 rooms and 65,000 square feet once made it the largest house west of the Mississippi.
Like many of its American country house contemporaries, the house’s exterior is an amalgamation of European influences, in this case, the Chateau Guiry-en-Vexin, Vaux-le-Vicomte, and to my eye, the rear of the Hôtel de Choiseul-Praslin in Paris and undoubtedly the Château de Champs-Sur-Marne. Inside, the first room visitors today see is the house’s most magnificent–its central atrium of Greek columns and gold-accented wrought iron balustrades stretches 103 feet up to a skylight, reportedly the largest interior space in any private home in the U.S. Ringed around this breathtaking hall are a dizzying array of sumptuous rooms decorated during a late 90s restoration by the “Prince of Chintz,” Mario Buatta.
But on a fateful day in February 1985, the house became the macabre site of one of that decade’s more gruesome crimes. The palace had been abandoned for years. It was fenced and monitored by security guards, including 23-year-old David Raley, a wannabe cop who liked to entice young girls with tours of the spooky mansion and then doing creepy things like asking them to go into rooms to scream to see how soundproof the place was.
On February 5, Laurie, 17, and Jeanine, 16, wanted to see inside. Raley directed them to park where nobody could see the car and then took them in. At the end of the tour, Raley told the girls that police dogs had arrived and they needed to hide, so he took them down to a basement safe, promising he wouldn’t close the door.
He did.
The tale that followed is a sordid one, but this is a travel story, not a true-crime podcast, so I’ll be brief. Raley opened the door again, but this time he was armed. He chained, sexually assaulted, and then stabbed each girl dozens of times before rolling them up in carpets and throwing them in his trunk. Then he drove home, watched TV with his sister, and played Monopoly. In the middle of the night, he took the somehow still-alive girls and dumped them in a ravine. Laurie managed to climb out and flag down help. Miraculously, she survived. Jeanine died of her wounds at the hospital. Raley remains on death row.
The ruins of a palace will always attract curious teens. When I was growing up in Newport, it was the burned remains of The Reef that called to us. For my dad’s generation, it was the fabled but abandoned Beacon Hill House, the largest estate in Newport. This was heightened for Carolands in the 80s because it gained notoriety when a porn production company snuck in and shot a video, All American Girls1, in its rooms. Per most porn, the acting and plot will easily make you cringe. One can imagine original owner Harriet Pullman Carolan shuddering in her grave.
Born in 1869, the same year as the transcontinental railroad was completed, Harriet was the second daughter of George Pullman who transformed rail travel from a generally hell-ish but necessary experience to one done in luxury with his Pullman cars. Privately owned Pullman cars decorated with elaborate wood and glasswork were essentially the private planes of the Gilded Age. “Mansions on rails,” they were dubbed by columnist Lucius Beebe. (I once had the good fortune of dining on FDR’s former private car, now permanently parked at D.C.’s Union Station.)2
He built America’s first factory town, Pullman, outside of Chicago. Unfortunately for Pullman, his name became synonymous not only with rail travel but also with the labor strife of the 1890s. After the depression of 1893, mass layoffs at Pullman precipitated one of the most contentious strikes in U.S. history. President Grover Cleveland sent in troops, who opened fire on the strikers.
Pullman died in 1897, after struggling unsuccessfully to recover from the stresses of the strike and its aftermath. He left most of his estate in the hands of his widow, but a sizable portion went to his daughter Harriet, who was now living in San Francisco.3 The Pullman company presidency was handed over to Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the 16th president.
While many of her contemporaries were off marrying dollar-hungry European nobility or other plutocratic offspring, Harriet seems to have married for love. In 1892 she married Francis Carolan, a dashing lace-curtain Irish-American from San Francisco. Her father reportedly gave Carolan stock from the Pullman company to bring his finances up to snuff. The pair established themselves in Burlingame, a suburb of San Francisco popular with its wealthiest citizens modeled after Maryland’s Chevy Chase and New York’s Tuxedo Park. Here, in 1897, the couple built their first estate, Crossways, a sort of stucco Queen Anne-ish house. It was also here in Burlingame that she developed her rivalry with Ethel Crocker, a flour heiress married to Will Crocker, the son of one of the four titans of the Central Pacific Railroad. (The others being Stanford, Huntington, and Hopkins.)4 Over the next few years, they snapped up an even larger estate, Crossways Farm, and one in Cupertino, Beaulieu.
Things happened fast at the turn of the century, with fortunes made and lost at breakneck speed. The same went for towns and cities, as populations swelled, tastes changed, and automobiles took off. In 1906, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake destroyed roughly 80 percent of San Francisco, killing thousands. While the city was being rebuilt, many of its well-off citizens fled to the suburbs down the peninsula. Burlingame was one popular spot, and as land there was quickly sold off for development, the uber-wealthy found the idyllic country life they’d constructed for themselves under threat. In 1910, they incorporated the town of Hillsborough (originally Hillsboro), a “municipality of millionaires” that they could control.
They instituted some strict rules to keep out the riff-raff: no hotels, businesses, gas stations, pay phones, jail, churches, or sidewalks. And no apartments–only single-family homes.
The Crockers kicked things off with a mansion on 300 acres designed by Willis Polk that is a wedding-cake fusion of the Grand Trianon and Italian Renaissance. It looks like the Villa Doria Pamphilj is sitting atop Rosecliff. It was intended to rival the great country houses being built on Long Island. But Harriet Pullman Carolan, notes one historian on the documentary The Heiress and Her Chateau, “was a great snob and a social climber.” And since the Crockers were considered the real leaders in San Francisco and Hillsborough, “Harriet wanted a way to put Ethel Crocker in her place … [she] intended to rule over California society from her chateau.”
Harriet’s ambitions were apparently no secret. When she bought hundreds of acres of rolling hills in Hillsborough in April 1912, The San Francisco Chronicle noted, “Mrs. Carolan has watched these elegant houses go up, and it has been said she decided to have a more beautiful place than any of them.”
She hired a star-crossed team: the most successful designer of private homes in France, Ernest Sanson, and the country’s top landscape architect, Achille Duchêne. To oversee the project stateside, she hired the architect of California’s cashed-up class–Willis Polk.
Duchêne was a titan in the world of landscaping and is still regarded as such, having laid out the gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte, Courances, and the Château de Champs-Sur-Marne. Sanson, however, has largely been forgotten, despite having designed a dozen or so of the most spectacular mansions in Paris. This is in part because while Americans have come to embrace the pompous revival buildings of the late 19th and early 20th century, the French are generally embarrassed by the excessive architecture aping the Bourbon kings that emerged during the reign of Napoleon III and continued until World War I.
But when Harriet, a rabid Francophile, was in Paris in the early 20th century, Sanson was the architect most desired by the industrialist class. She was likely influenced in her choice by Boni de Castellane, one of the most ridiculous figures of the era who helped her shop for art, furnishings, and whole rooms that she bought and shipped back stateside.
Boni was one of the great titled fortune hunters of Europe (he called his memoir The Art of Being Poor).
“Americans have since said too often that gentlemen only seek money to restore their image,” he wrote. “However, this observation is not justified, because if young girls bring material well-being as a dowry, we give them, in exchange, what cannot be bought: in addition to a name, a tradition and a taste that their education does not make them capable of conquering for themselves.”
He landed one of the era’s biggest prizes, Anna Gould, the 20-year-old daughter of tycoon Jay Gould. With her fortune (before she dumped him) he restored the Château du Marais, snagged the Château de Grignan, the yacht Walhalla, and had Sanson build what was arguably the most opulent private home in Paris–the Palais Rose.
Set on 2.5 acres on the Avenue Foch, the pink marble palace opened in 1902. Inspired by the Grand Trianon, it featured an entrance based on the Ambassador’s Staircase in Versailles and rooms that left visitors staggering. The house was destroyed in 1969, the same period when many such mansions met a similar fate in the U.S.
A frequent guest, Harriet commissioned Sanson to build her a palace of her own.
The mansion Sanson designed is, to be frank, not his best. While tour guides at the mansion and the documentaries and books will speak about it with the utmost reverence, the house has always seemed more on the Château Louis XIV (bought by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman) end of the spectrum than a Rosecliff or Elms when it comes to revival style mansions.
In fact their reverence–“It takes you to a point where it can’t get more beautiful” gushed one tour guide, and a later owner, upon saving it, declared “I may have just saved the finest residence in the world today”–dredged up scornful feelings I had the first time I watched The OC about the flimsy and silly nature of California attempts at class-based snobbery. It doesn’t even compare to the East (which may be how Europeans feel about the Eastern U.S.!)
Perhaps it is the material–the house is stucco over concrete as opposed to stone–which gives it a Disney-like quality. Perhaps it is also that each facade references a completely different house in France, which robs the mansion of any sense of cohesion. The domed side, its most photographed, looks as if somebody inflated and stretched the front of Château de Champs-Sur-Marne. While the house only sits on a few acres today, it was once surrounded by hundreds of acres and in photos it looks forlorn. That isn’t because Duchêne’s gardens were never enacted, but rather I suspect because the house itself is more suited to an urban setting than the countryside.
It was a glaring Gallic weakness, critic Montgomery Schulyer cattily opined in Architectural Record, “that the Frenchman is not skilled in rural architecture. His ordinary ‘château’ and ‘villa’ is a most uninteresting, perked-up affair, narrow and high, and planned as much as possible like a large city house.”5 This is especially true of the entrance on the south side of Carolands, which is redolent of John Russell Pope’s Meridian House in Washington–an exceptionally elegant facade in a city environment. The only other house Sanson did in the U.S., the Perry Belmont House also found in D.C., however, is a graceful success.
“I’m afraid you will get yourself into trouble,” Harriet’s mother warned when she saw the plans, “and may not have anything after you build it.”
Mrs. Pullman was prophetic. Her daughter was outrageously wealthy, but not chateau-building level. World War I hurt the Pullman company, which put a crimp in her finances. She ended up begging her mother for money to finish the job, but even another $1 million couldn’t pull it off.
Other than the terraces immediately girding the house, the gardens by Duchêne were never realized. Inside, the dining room of faux Sienna marble, the oak-paneled library, the bedroom suites, and the loggia similar to that of the Elms were completed. A series of neoclassical Louis XVI salons pried from a manse in Bordeaux and shipped to California made the cut. But the ballroom remained unfinished. Despite modern construction, the house had all the calamities of a much older castle.
“If one were to flush just one toilet, even in the uppermost reaches of the attic floor, the reverberation of its sound through the great stair court was a Niagara. If more than one were flushed anywhere in the house, it became a great cacophony of roaring waters,” writes Sewall Bogart in Carolands, Hillsboro: Imperious Survivor. “The very-French doors and windows would rattle, squeak, and chatter,” the elevator constantly stalled, and there were constant power outages. Not even the weather cooperated: “The views of the mountains, the bay and city of San Francisco were outstanding when the chateau wasn't shrouded in fog.”
As her grand plans for a chateau fell apart, so too did her marriage. The Carolans separated in 1917, Harriet remarried, and only visited the unfinished house a couple more times. In the 1920s, she emptied the house of its furnishings, leaving it vacant with a caretaker. Once, while looking down from the eastern side of her house, she sighed, "Well, at least I can look down on the Crockers."
Chunks of the estate’s 500-plus acres were slowly sold off for development, and in 1945 the house and remaining handful of acres were sold to the inventor of the electric toothbrush, Tomlinson Moseley. His family occupied a fraction of the rooms, and a few years later moved out. As with so many of the Gilded Age houses at this time, Carolands changed hands multiple times in rapid succession, each owner finding no solution for such a financial albatross.
By 1950, a developer had his hands on it with plans for demolition, but Countess Lilian Dandini, the heiress to the Remillard Brick Company whose bricks essentially rebuilt San Francisco, stepped in. This eccentric woman ruled over the diminished estate for the next two decades. Under her reign, it finally came alive with a never-ending stream of parties, both ones she threw and, as her ever-dwindling fortune was depleted by the house, ones thrown by those she lent her house to. (One of her conditions for using her house for a party was that she had to be invited.)
The countess died in 1973, and once again Carolands went through a succession of buyers, lawsuits, bankruptcies, and threats of demolition. Marooned on just a little over five acres, the house was fenced in and guarded by security. The pornographers pulled off their guerrilla film and the horrific attack on the teenage girls brought the house back into the news.
In the early 1990s, a charity decorators showhouse was held in its rooms to raise money to save the house. One of its attendees was Ann Johnson, the wife of billionaire Charles Johnson. Tagging along with Mrs. Johnson was her decorator, Mario Buatta.
“This is one of the most beautiful rooms I’ve ever seen,” she exclaimed upon seeing the library to the “Prince of Chintz,” so-called because of his use of cheery floral textiles. “I don’t know who the architect was, but this is some room.”
A half-decade later, the Johnsons bought Carolands for $6 million and sunk heaps more into restoration. With Buatta as the decorator, they finished the never-completed ballroom and updated all the rooms in a combination of respectful historicism and modern comfort. A decade later, they turned it over to a foundation they created with plans to offer tours.
You can take one of those tours today, if you’re one of the lucky few to win the lottery for a tour available once a week on Wednesdays. ProPublica has an excellent report on the shame of this situation and how it runs contrary to promises the Johnsons made when they received tens of millions in tax savings by promising to fulfill its “charitable and educational purpose by opening the Carolands Estate to the public” with tours all week. When I visited, I asked my guide if any changes had been planned since the report ran, I was told no, because of sensitivities around having a stream of tourists in the neighborhood. At least the tours are free.
It’s hard not to feel there could be some form of compromise. But, that exclusivity is also what has kept the mansion somewhat a secret gem.
Two notes from last week’s newsletter. When I said I didn’t know anybody who had stayed at a Nobu property, I really messed up. It turns out my sisters stayed at the one in Marrakech last year and they were generally fans.
A friend from French tourism also wrote to say that those considering alternatives to Giverny should check out Maison Caillebotte or even Auvers-sur-Oise if they are Impressionist fans.
DEPARTMENT OF GRIEVANCES
AirBnB had an elaborate showcase for their new “Icons” campaign, which is their gimmicky listings like the Barbie house or being able to stay at a house where you have lunch with Christina Aguilera. Brian Chesky, the founder and CEO, argues that they give the site much-needed press coverage, but to me it just seems like a clumsy distraction from the very real problems plaguing the company: excess fees, fights with local communities, etc.
Expedia Group elaborated in its earnings call that it plans to focus on brand differentiation (it owns Expedia, Vrbo, Hotels.com, Travelocity, Orbitz, and more) because the migration toward one reward program called One Key hurt Hotels.com and Vrbo in particular. This is no surprise to many of us who were huge Hotels.com loyalists and proponents–the switch to One Key turned Hotels.com from one of the easiest to understand and most valuable rewards programs (One free night for every ten nights. The value of that free night was an average of the ten) to one that is inscrutable and yields only a fraction of the previous benefit.
I just flew United to Europe and was struck again by how outside of business class, flight attendants have to repeat a hundred plus times what the offerings are for dinner, which clearly annoys them. Put it on the app! Speaking of the United app, I enjoyed this negative review of their app changes. The increase in pulling users out of the app and onto a browser page has become very annoying
We live under the constant threat of the Americanization of everything around the world (three cheers to places like France for their obduracy) and it appears English soccer is the latest potential victim.
I wish this Washington Post piece on celebrity tequilas had actually said which ones are bad. Come on!
TRAVEL INDUSTRY NEWS
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Jean-Georges Vongerichten Is Opening a Members Club in New York City. Here’s a look at the plans.
Here’s a description of the private car Pullman built for himself, which he made available for every president from Grant to McKinley by Sewall Bogart: “The car was completed in the company’s Detroit shops where fifteen woodcarvers worked for months producing its satinwood and vermilion interior. It had a seven-foot observation room, a seven-foot bedroom, dining salon, a toilet compartment with tub as well as a kitchen, office, and storeroom. The overall length was sixty-six feet. A small organ was a feature of the dining salon which doubled as a lounge and its decor was of heavy tasseled and fringed drapes, velvet portieres, and wall-to-wall carpet that had been loomed just for the car.”
Her twin younger brothers, George, Jr. and Walter Sanger received a paltry $3,000 a year. Their father found them a perpetual embarrassment. Harriet challenged the will to get them more, but the courts said no.
In that same passage, Schuyler writes glowingly of the city mansions that have gone up around the Parc Monceau, many of which Sanson designed.
Fascinating! Yet, another tour of CA