Casa Encantada

Commission and construction The house was commissioned by Hilda Olsen Boldt Weber (1885–1951), who bought 9.5 acres on a hilltop site from the Bel-Air Country Club for $100,000 in 1936 (equivalent to $ million in ). The architectural historian and real estate executive Jeffrey Hyland, writing in The Legendary Estates of Beverly Hills, describes the price as an "astonishing sum" in the midst of the Great Depression; comparable large estates had remained unsold for many years at similar prices. Unlike other prominent local residents, Weber was an outsider to the Los Angeles motion picture community and was a member of the nouveau riche, having married a wealthy glass manufacturer. The landscape architect Benjamin Morton Purdy redesigned the gardens in 1935 under Weber's patronage. The completed interiors were photographed in 1938 by Maynard L. Parker, who had previously photographed Robsjohn-Gibbings's decorative work for the interior of Paul Flato's shop at 8637 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Conrad Hilton Weber put the house and its contents up for sale in 1948 for $1.5 million, less than its original construction cost a decade earlier. Prospective buyers included the set designer Cedric Gibbons and his wife Dolores del Río, the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer co-founder Louis B. Mayer, and the publisher William Randolph Hearst. It sold in November 1950 to Conrad Hilton for $225,000 (equivalent to $ million in ), who occupied the house until his death in 1979. Weber committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills the year after the sale, overwhelmed by her precarious financial situation and unpaid bills. Hilton described his enchantment with the house as "a case of love at first sight...I couldn't resist it, one of the fabulous houses of the world" and renamed the property the Casa Encantada. Hilton preserved the house and its contents for several decades, which Hyland described as an "extraordinary time capsule of high-style 1940s taste". The house is hidden from the street and surrounded by mature trees and the golf courses of the Bel-Air Country Club. Hyland speculated in 2019 that the land value alone was $175 million and that it would be impossible to duplicate such a residence in the present era owing to a shortage of craftspeople and prohibitive building costs. == Design ==

Architecture and grounds Weber commissioned James Dolena to design her new residence in March 1936. Dolena's working drawings described the style as "modern Georgian with Grecian influences", a nod to the Georgian revival architecture then in vogue, with influences from ancient Greek and Roman architecture. The interior was the responsibility of Peterson Studios of Santa Barbara and the English furniture and interior designer T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, who created and manufactured carpets, fabrics, and more than two hundred pieces of furniture for the house. Each piece was stamped "Robsjohn-Gibbings – Sans epoque" to express the timelessness of his creations and their freedom from any individual historical period. Weber's patronage of Robsjohn-Gibbings was atypical among her contemporaries, who tended to purchase overpriced reproduction furniture from department stores. Hilton self-published a book about the house in which he described the "clearly discernible Greek influences" of the house, with its aesthetic lines sweeping in "regal beauty...carry[ing] a classical motif into the interior through columns of Doric and Ionic simplicity. Doors, rugs, upholstering, draperies, decorative objects, all bear the integrating mark of the Greek key design". The setting of the house, along with its rich colors and the harmonic texture of its design, had helped "shrink the architectural mass a third of a city block in size to the conceptual intimacy of a country cottage". == References ==