Reflection: Hearst Castle Visit

This post was originally written on December 13th, 2010. I'm not sure why I never posted it. Too nerdy, maybe? Oh well!
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It is 10:12 on a Monday night. I am laying on a bed in my room at the Wine Valley Inn in Solvang. To my right is the bathroom, where the pipes sound like rain. To my left is my mother snoring away. There isn't much to do in Solvang. It is a lot like Bruges... but less historic. The roads are cobbled and the shops close at five. There is nothing good on TV. So I blog.

(Ed. Note: Our trip to Solvang was filled with In Bruges references, cause that movie is the effing best!)

Today we visited the estate of William Randolph Hearst in San Simeon, also know as the Hearst Castle. It was pretty incredible.  

I was blown away by the sheer size of the ranch. Everything about this well-preserved Hearst dwelling was monumental. For instance, this is the guest house. The guest house!

I fell completely in love with the exterior architectural design, the lush gardens, the marble greco-roman sculptures, the fountains, and especially the two pools. Fantastic and mesmerizing.

(With one exception--he had several Renaissance sarcophagi positioned around the estate & I think that is weird. Why collect & display fancy marble coffins??)

In fact, I'm totally envious of this guy--- (All of the groundskeepers seem to be living it up. I saw one guy messing around on a bike, weaving around the columns in the pool area--the same area that tourists were chastised in for leaning on the marble walls...hmm.)

Dream Job

Call Hearst excessive, but if I had a few cool millions... Sure, I'd invest, invest, invest but eventually I would also have exact replicas of his pools! Your eyes can thank me later for this marvelous feast!

Neptune Pool

Interior Pool

Fucking fantastic. I think I might be drooling. What I love about the exterior site and pool areas is that there is a sense of cohesiveness. The entire interior pool follows a navy, ultramarine, and gold color palette, and the style is clearly Roman.

The same cannot be said for the inside of these other living spaces. The decor was all over the place! It is seriously like he collected too much shit and didn't know how to arrange it. It was well known that he constantly changed his mind about where he thought things went best. Maybe what is left for the tourists now is the end result of the life long process of rearranging. Maybe he died before he could perfect it. Or maybe where he went wrong was when he decided to collected all that drab religious crap the 15th century Spanish and Italian Catholic stuff.

In the dining room (aka "the refectory"), for instance, we have a French stone fireplace, Flemish tapestries, cathedral choir stalls that line the walls, and a carved wooden ceiling with Italian saints on it. On the one hand, it is an impressive collection for a single room, on the other hand, the refectory is a mutt of a space!

The tour guide said that the walls are gothic stone that went with flying buttresses (high arches--think Notre Dame Cathedral) but when the shipments arrived, it was too difficult to piece it together. The Italian wooded ceiling was then chosen to top off the room. Mix and match! As you can see in this wonderful picture I took, this room has: tapestries, wood, stone, more wood,  and decorated with glass chandeliers and flags. Am I the only one who goes crazy looking at all this? It's a mess!!

But it's so fascinating. The saints in the ceiling are carved so that each of their heads sort of stick out and look down, which suggests that the ceiling wasn't originally a ceiling at all but a wall. As a ceiling, it wouldn't be necessary to bring their heads forward if one were viewing them by looking directly up. Hearst appropriated his collected artifacts and art pieces to meet his needs. In a way, he is breathing new life into the objects, giving them a contemporary purpose (ask any of the tour guides and they'll tell you this). The other piece of this argument is that he is destroying part of their essence by de-contextualizing and re-purposing them.

This, however, is the same old argument that gets brought up about museums in general--for when we go to museums, we are not experiencing and seeing works the way they are originally meant to be seen (unless we are talking about contemporary artists creating pieces for museum spaces). This is one of my favorite things to think about. Like museums, Hearst then can use these pieces for his own ideological purposes. Why turn your pools into temples and your dining halls into gothic monasteries? My personal theory is that he aimed to channel the reverence, drama, and monumentality of religious arts into the Hearst dynasty's identity. Or maybe he just liked collecting stuff.