Julia Morgan made roughly 600 turnaround trips between Oakland and the Central California coast to build a hilltop fantasy that was never supposed to exist in the first place. For 28 years, she managed a client who changed his mind constantly, hired and lost four construction superintendents, and once insisted on converting a finished pool to salt water against all advice, a decision that destroyed the plumbing and went unrepaired for more than a decade. The Hearst Castle semi-private Julia Morgan Tour puts visitors inside rooms the standard crowds never reach, tracing the architect’s decisions, improvisations, and extraordinary patience through the antique ceilings, hand-dug bedrock, and gilded gates she left behind.
The architect Life Magazine forgot to name
Guide Craig opened the tour with a point he says he emphasizes on every visit: when Life Magazine ran Hearst Castle on its front cover in 1958, the year the estate opened as a museum, the article mentioned William Randolph Hearst and the castle at length but never once named the architect. Julia Morgan, born in San Francisco in 1872, had graduated from UC Berkeley in civil engineering in 1894 and then became the first woman to complete the architecture program at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1902. She had 503 completed projects before this one. She would go on to oversee 200 additional unrelated projects at the same time construction ran here. Craig put her philosophy plainly: ‘I’m not going to be famous, my work is going to be famous.’
Her method was the opposite of Frank Lloyd Wright’s. She asked clients what they wanted and then built it. She was a Beaux-Arts-trained architect designing reinforced concrete structures in the 1920s when almost nobody was, which is why a 6.5 magnitude earthquake in 2003 left the four hilltop homes with no structural damage. The concrete, however, could not save the Neptune Pool from cracking. Losing 5,000 gallons of water a day after that quake, the pool required a 10-million-dollar repair completed between 2014 and 2018.
Rooms built on top of rooms that were not supposed to be there
Hearst’s appetite for additions drove Morgan into a series of architectural problems that became their own form of ingenuity. The main house started as a two-story structure and eventually became four stories, each new floor added as an afterthought. When Hearst wanted a fourth floor in 1932, the existing bell towers became the solution: bedrooms were tucked under the bells, which were raised, while a 2,500-gallon water tank was installed in each tower above. The living room connecting those bell-tower bedrooms ended up with a fireplace planted in its center because the original chimney had been a rooftop stack before the floor above it was added.
The indoor Roman pool presented a different problem entirely. Hearst wanted a second swimming pool styled after a mausoleum in Ravenna. Morgan asked where he wanted it. He pointed to the existing gymnasium, a finished reinforced concrete building. There was no way to bring in machinery. The pool, 10 feet deep across its full length, was hand-dug through bedrock. It holds 205,000 gallons of water and is lined with over 2 million handmade Italian tiles, each pounded with fists before curing to produce an aged surface. The 22-and-24-karat gold mosaic above the waterline was laid by hand. Hearst then decided, in 1933, to convert it to a saltwater pool. Morgan’s team warned him. He put in 17 tons of salt anyway. It destroyed the plumbing and filtration system. Repairs did not happen until 1944.
Through the cottage interiors, Craig traced Morgan’s other constant challenge: fitting antique objects that were never meant to coexist. Ceilings from torn-down European structures almost never arrived in the right dimensions. One Italian ceiling in a guest suite was cut in half to fit. The Spanish doors in the living room of one cottage existed as only a single matched pair; Morgan commissioned a Swiss-Italian woodworker named Joel Supo to fabricate a second pair to match. The dining room upstairs has 30 fireplaces across the mansion and nine chimney systems in the main house alone, but the guide noted plainly that they were not particularly effective at heating the 27-foot-ceilinged rooms.
A clock with a story nobody expected
On a narrow third-floor study rarely included in public tours, Craig recalled the moment a colleague on the curatorial staff stopped him mid-tour to show him something on a German clock from the 1600s, made in Augsburg. The scene worked into the gilded case was not a religious tableau or a classical myth. It was a Jewish folk tale. ‘I said Nicole, what is going on with that,’ Craig recalled. She told him she had no explanation for it either.
The Neptune Pool, where visitors ended the tour waiting for the bus back, was the first version Hearst commissioned in 1924. He ordered it rebuilt twice before it reached its current form in 1936, once after deciding he wanted something grander and again after his 1926 partnership with MGM made him want something grander still. Construction workers dug around the pool with picks and shovels while actresses in bathing suits swam behind tarps. The six Roman temple columns at the far end are from the first through fourth centuries A.D., purchased in Italy in 1921. Neptune himself and the surrounding nereids were bought the same year from a New York dealer for twelve thousand dollars.
