Living with antiques: - southern California's Villa San Maurizio - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 1999 by Richard P. Wunder

Villa San Maurizio in southern California

When the owner of the Villa San Maurizio left the East Coast for the milder climate of southern California, he decided he did not want to build just another Mediterranean-style house. Instead he desired a house that reflected the kind of life embodied in the country seats designed by Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) for wealthy Venetians in the sixteenth century. A collector of eighteenth-century English furniture, bronze sculpture, and ceramics, he felt the Palladian style would provide a harmonious setting for his collection.

The house is situated on a hillside, so one side is two stories high while the other is one. The two-story facade, overlooking the garden and the Pacific Ocean beyond, is based on the street facade of the Villa Carnaro, at Piombono Dese, near Treviso, Italy, built to Palladio's designs in 1553. The entrance facade is modeled on the portico of Palladio's Villa Chiericati, near Vicenza, completed in 1574. Certain modifications had to he made to conform with local zoning laws, most notably reducing the height of the decorations on the roof because of the ever-present threat of earthquakes in Califorma.

The house is painted the shade of yellow chosen by Palladio for the Villa Barbaro, at Maser, where it was intended to represent summer, the season of the grain harvest. The garden statuary and parts of the architectural ornament are of stone from the same quarries near Vicenza that supplied Palladio's builders.

One enters the house from an enclosed courtyard containing statues of the Four Seasons (see Pl. II). The mahogany double doorway opens onto a transverse hallway with walls and columns of cast stone that replicates Italian travertine and a floor of Carrara marble (Pl. I). Directly opposite the doorway is the grand living room (Pls. V, VIII), which opens onto the balcony overlooking the lower garden ringed by Italian cypresses.

The house is named for Saint Maurice, a warior saint particularly venerated in Venice, and the owner's namesake. Solidly constructed using the latest technology and with steel reinforcements to withstand earthquakes, Villa San Maurizio should outlast many of the other houses in its neighborhood and long remain a monument to the owner's taste and perspicacity.

RICHARD P. WUNDER, now retired, was the founding director of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City. He has written numerous books and articles on European and American art.