Historical Homes
Stimson House is a Richardsonian Romanesque mansion in the University Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Built in 1891, it was the home of lumber and banking millionaire Thomas Douglas Stimson. During Stimson’s lifetime, the house survived a dynamite attack by a blackmailer in 1896. After Stimson’s death, the house has been occupied by a brewer who reportedly stored wines and other spirits in the basement, a fraternity house that conducted noisy parties (causing consternation among occupants of neighboring mansions), as student housing for Mount St. Mary’s College, and as a convent for the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet.
Architecture
When Stimson House was built in the 1890s, the Los Angeles Times described it as “the costliest and most beautiful private residence in Los Angeles,” a building “admired by all who see it.More than a hundred years later, the Times said: “From the front, the 31⁄2-story house resembles a medieval castle, with brick chimneys standing guard like sentries along the roof and an ornate four-story crenelated tower on the northeast corner, a noble rook from a massive chess board.With its $150,000 cost, it was the most expensive house that had been built in Los Angeles at the time.
From the day it was built, the 30-room house was a Los Angeles landmark.Neighbors and occupants have referred to it over the years as “the Castle” or the “Red Castle” due to its turret-top walls, four-story tower, and red-stone exterior.
Exterior features
The original occupant, Thomas Douglas Stimson, hired architect H. Carroll Brown, then only 27 years old, to design his new home. Stimson designed the home principally in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, with rough-hewn stone, round headed arches, short columns, rows of arched or rectangular windows and an overall fortress quality.The Richardsonian style was popular in the Upper Midwest in the 1880s, though the style never became popular in Los Angeles. Stimson reportedly wanted his new home to resemble the brick-and-stone mansions of Chicago’s Gold Coast, including the Palmer Mansion. A Los Angeles Times music critic reviewing a chamber music performance at the house in 1989 called its architecture “Midwestern Ivanhoe.” With its Gothic tower and other features, the style of the house is not strictly Richardsonian. A Times writer in 1948 noted that the house presents a “puzzling” appearance: “Its architecture reflects the Mission influence, a bit of Byzantine, something Latin and a little Fort Ticonderoga.”
Brown obtained the distinctive red stones from a quarry in New Mexico and used San Fernando sandstone for the windows, balconies and the tower’s crown trim.The most prominent feature on the house is the four-story Gothic tower. The top of the tower and ridges are crenellated and finished with notched battlements. Other important features include a third floor balcony with a gabled arch and a stepped gable with a Palladian window. A porch with carved stone columns surrounds the first floor.
The neighborhood in which the Stimson House was built became known as “Millionaires Row” in the 1890s, though the size and stone construction of Stimson House set it apart from the wood houses along Millionaires Row.
Interior features
Some have noted the “irony” in a lumber baron’s home being built of stone rather than wood. However, the interior has been described as “a shrine to lumber, a museum of wood, a smorgasbord of timber — ash, sycamore, birch, mahogany, walnut, gumwood and oak, all shipped from lumber yards in the Midwest.Each room on the first floor is furnished with a different type of wood, and the heavy doors have double thickness, to match the wood of the room on either side.An intricate parquet border is found at the edge of the oak floors throughout the house.
Under the first floor there is a basement, “a maze of rooms and arched doorways.” There was a room that at one time served as an underground lounge and bar. In another recess there was a wine cellar equipped with an iron door that served as a makeshift jail cell and the scene of many pranks during the house’s later years as a fraternity house. There were also traces of organ pipes that once were installed there.
The interior features also included a Diebold safe hidden behind a door in Stimson’s study. The nuns who occupied the house in later years reportedly stored their cleaning supplies in the safe. Stimson reportedly took photographs of his Chicago mansion and hired Carsley and East Manufacturing Co. to duplicate them and ship the finished products to Los Angeles.
