Those who have experienced England’s stately homes or France’s chateaux may sniff at the idea of visiting a historic country house in relatively young California, a destination more associated with surfing, showbiz and Silicon Valley than the sober contemplation of antiquities.
The name of San Jose’s Winchester Mystery House also has a suspiciously theme-park flavour, as if engineered for entertainment, and so it’s no surprise to learn that its current executive director, Walter Magnuson, came from Walt Disney, the ultimate theme-park operator.
But he rejects any suspicion of inauthenticity. “We have to take the history seriously,” he says.
His research shows that the local press had labelled the sprawling, architecturally quirky mansion as mysterious long before the 1922 death of its creator, and before it opened to the public as the “House of Mystery” a century ago, in 1923.
How an incomplete eight-room farmhouse ended up as a 160-room mansion, with 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, 13 bathrooms and 17 chimneys, is indeed a story worth hearing.
Sarah Lockwood Pardee, born 1839, was a mere four feet 10 inches(1.47 metres) tall, but in 1862 she married into a towering fortune. Her husband, William Wirt Winchester, was a son of the founder of Winchester Repeating Arms, and upon his death in 1881 she inherited a 50 per cent stake in the company, worth US$20 million – more than US$600 million in today’s money.
In Stalin’s footsteps in Georgia, from his birthplace to his bath
In Stalin’s footsteps in Georgia, from his birthplace to his bath
The continuing success of the Winchester rifle, “The Gun that Won the West”, with its easy flick-of-the-wrist reloading, gave her a vast income.
She acquired the San Jose farmhouse in 1886, and spent more than three decades expanding it into an extravaganza of cupolas and cornices, towers and turrets, gables and gardens.
History is perhaps taken a little less seriously on the guided tour, although many a claim is cautiously prefixed with “It is said” or “Legend has it”.
There’s much mention of spiritualism and of Sarah Winchester’s fascination with the number 13, but alternative, more prosaic explanations for the house’s many bizarre features do not detract from its appealing eccentricity.
A staircase that drops seven steps and then rises eleven merely does so to provide access to an extension whose floor levels did not match up. A large window onto a blank wall is the result of the addition of a lift shaft – Winchester was an early adopter of modern technology.
A staircase that uses 44 tiny steps to rise only about nine feet (2.75 metres), zigzagging back and forth, was a practical response to the severe arthritis of her later years, its child-size width also suited to her small proportions.
Other curiosities include one door from a room that, “legend has it”, was forbidden to servants and given over to seances. This gives on to an eight-foot plunge into the sink of a kitchen below.
One staircase dead-ends at a ceiling, and another door provides an exit from the house, but only to thin air one storey above ground level.
Winchester supposedly spent 36 years living with the sound of construction, and, as the daughter of a decorative carpenter, placed more reliance on those of the same trade than on architects.
Other explanations for the constant changes of floor level and more confusing features include the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which left a seven-storey tower leaning 30 degrees to the south, and saw unreinforced fireplaces drop to the ground as rubble.
Everything above four storeys was subsequently removed, and the front 30 rooms of the house, including the bedroom where Winchester was temporarily trapped by the earthquake, were permanently abandoned and left in a state of slightly eerie disrepair, the laths revealed behind sections of fallen plaster.
The furniture was auctioned off after Winchester’s death, but most of the 110 rooms visited on the tour have been refurnished with high-quality pieces from the period, and some of the original embossed Lincrusta wallcovering, fabulously expensive, still survives.
“As used in Buckingham Palace,” mentions the guide, although Lincrusta, still in business, claims only that it adorns unspecific “royal residences”.
Away from the upstairs warrens of parlours, bedrooms, bathrooms and servants’ quarters, the main reception rooms on the ground floor, some painstakingly redecorated using Winchester’s extensive stocks of unused material, are spectacularly luxurious.
They feature finely turned fittings, ornate stained-glass windows, a German chandelier, patterned parquet floors in mahogany and teak, and panelling in white ash and chestnut.
“Winchester Mystery House is such a wonderful name because we try to leave it up to the guests to decide when they leave why Sarah did the things that she did,” says Magnuson.
The exit is, inevitably, through the gift shoppe [sic]. Branded oven gloves are available.
Whether Winchester’s stimulus was spiritual or secular doesn’t matter. The hour-long tour of this overgrown dolls’ house will satisfy even the sniffiest sceptic, and makes a visit to the city of San Jose worthwhile in its own right.