Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Leilani and Floyd Frisch stand in front of their Los Gatos home. Designed by Julia Morgan, the building was actually created as the guest house for the large Mediterranean estate Morgan designed just up the hill.

Circle of Friends

Kappa Alpha Theta sorority sisters played key role in architect's many commissions

By Sandy Sims

The name of Julia Morgan, the architect who in the early part of the 20th century designed magnificent homes and public buildings, including Hearst Castle at San Simeon, has been in the news in neighboring Saratoga more than once in recent months.

Expansion plans for the Federated Church, a proposal for new homes on property adjacent to the Saratoga Foothill Club and, most recently, a proposed housing development on property where Morgan's Goodrich mansion sits have all gone before the city's planning commission.

In every instance, the importance of preserving the integrity of Morgan's work has been a part of the discussion.

But Saratoga is not the only West Valley community where Julia Morgan left her mark.

In Los Gatos, the architect designed a dormitory and school classrooms for the Montezuma School for Boys, a barn (now gone) and two private homes, including the beautiful Mediterranean-style Huntington-Perkins house in the Los Gatos hills--and a 5,000-square-foot guest house to go with it.

Morgan, a slight, 5-foot tall woman who today is recognized as a giant among architects, was one of the first women to graduate from UC-Berkeley's civil engineering department. She was also the first woman to earn the coveted certificate in architecture from the acclaimed Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1902. Today, hundreds of her creations span the whole state of California, making this state a gallery of her magnificent work.

In addition to treasures like Hearst Castle, Morgan created the Asilomar conference grounds in Pacific Grove, the San Francisco Examiner and Los Angeles Examiner buildings, and several beautiful buildings at Mills College and on the Berkeley campus. She designed and oversaw the building of shipping centers, schools, clubs, churches, YWCAs, mansions, cottages and much more.

In Saratoga, Morgan designed the Saratoga Foothill Club and the Federated Church, both on Park Place, and four private homes, including the Goodrich mansion. With her work having achieved the status of architectural treasures, these buildings are of historical significance.

If it weren't for Sara Boutelle, a retired instructor of art and architectural history at Brearly School in New York and author of the book Julia Morgan Architect, Morgan might be just another obscure building designer.

In a telephone interview with the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, Boutelle explains that she stumbled onto Morgan when her children insisted on taking her to Hearst Castle at San Simeon in 1972.

Enthralled with the architecture and curious about the architect, Boutelle began to look into Morgan's work but found little information anywhere. Still, she couldn't let the subject go, and establishing Julia Morgan's legacy became a passion for Boutelle. She spent more than 15 years tracking down anything she could find on Morgan. She learned that when the 79-year-old Morgan closed her San Francisco Merchant Exchange Building office in 1951, she burned all of her drawings and records.

Morgan apparently figured her clients had duplicates, and no one seemed interested in her drawings. Then, too, Morgan had guarded her privacy. Numerous attempts were made to write articles about Morgan, but she turned reporters away.

After much sifting and often following only tentative leads, Boutelle has been able to reconstruct a history of the magnificent body of work done by Morgan. And a list of more than 700 buildings is still growing. These days, identifying an unknown work of Morgan's is like finding a lost Rembrandt.

Aside from Morgan's enormous talent, several opportunities brought her success early in life (at about age 30). She'd been in her own San Francisco office just two years when the 1906 earthquake hit. This tragedy created many commissions for reconstruction design, including the toppled Fairmont Hotel. The recognition she earned in designing the new Fairmont brought her more contracts.

A more personal network for Morgan was among her sorority sisters from Kappa Alpha Theta from her days at Berkeley. Theta member Lucretia Watson (Mrs. B. Grant Taylor) commissioned Morgan to design a house in Saratoga, and Grace Fisher Richards, also a Theta member, commissioned Morgan for the Saratoga Federated Church.

Through her architecture, Morgan became affiliated with the early 20th-century movement for women's organizations. Particularly important were the buildings she designed for the YWCA in various cities in California and in Honolulu and Salt Lake City. This association connected Morgan with Phoebe Hearst, who would later be her link to William Randolph Hearst and the castle at San Simeon. The YWCA was probably Morgan's largest institutional client, and she was commissioned by them to design the YWCA Asilomar conference grounds. Her three-story YWCA building in downtown San Jose was lost to the wrecking ball in 1973 during that city's urban renewal days. Morgan also built hostess houses where women and families could visit with their soldiers during WWI. The MacArthur Park restaurant in Palo Alto was originally one of those.

Morgan never married. Her complete devotion was to her work. She spent all of her days and nights and weekends poring over plans and climbing scaffolding, making sure the workmanship was up to her high standards.

Morgan's architectural education at the Beaux-Arts was eclectic, covering classical, medieval and Renaissance style and more. A great deal of her talent was in her ability to use all styles depending on what she thought was needed at the site and on what her clients wanted. For example, in the Saratoga hayfield where the Goodrich home was to be built, Morgan chose a California-style English country house.

Mary McHugh knows the Goodrich house better than anyone. At age 17, she began working as housekeeper at the newly built Goodrich home just after she arrived from Ireland. For 51 years she supervised the care and maintenance of most aspects of the house. Today, just a few days short of turning 90, McHugh sits in her small home in Saratoga surrounded by memorabilia from the Goodrich home. In an interview with the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, she explained with a slight Irish brogue that the wide expanse of the Goodrich house, the sandblasted redwood trim and the low-pitched roof were to seem to "melt into the ground."

Morgan paid close attention to detail. McHugh remembers Mrs. Goodrich telling how, during construction, Morgan climbed a ladder and threw some plaster on the wall, then spread the plaster to show the plasterer exactly how the Tiffany glaze design on the inside walls should look. Morgan also hung the garage doors to slide open so that the chauffeur could fit the Goodrich's Pierce Arrow through the opening.

For the Huntington-Perkins house in Los Gatos, Morgan created a magnificent Mediterranean-style house graced with arches and pillars. This secret paradise, tucked into the hills above the town, overlooks the valley and beyond to San Francisco. It cost $90,000 to construct in 1919-1920. According to Boutelle's book, Clara Perkins collaborated with Morgan to build what she saw as a "Renaissance hillside retreat for a former princess seeking privacy." (Perkins was divorced from a German prince.)

The 5,000-square-foot guest house is designed in the Berkeley shingle style and is nestled just below the main house. It also has a view "all the way to San Francisco," says Floyd Frisch, the Los Gatos lawyer who with his wife, Leilani, a Los Gatos interior-designer, owns the guest house.

Although Morgan enjoyed classical designs, she was also attracted to the simplicity of the Arts and Crafts style. Its large, open buildings came into vogue early this century. The dictates of this style included using materials from the environment where the building was constructed. Its design was simple and utilitarian, with details based on local traditional and natural sources and without any meaningless ornamentation. The elements of Arts and Crafts construction meant the beams and pillars were left visible to show the high quality of workmanship. Even the wood went unpainted. This is the style in which Morgan designed Asilomar. These conference grounds remain the largest institutional complex in the Arts and Crafts style. The building that houses MacArthur Park restaurant is also in this style.

Of course, Morgan's most elaborate and time-consuming work was for William Randolph Hearst. Her working relationship with him brought her great joy. He was a free spender who commissioned her over and over to design spectacular and enchanting buildings. She loved medieval architecture, and so did Hearst. In fact, Boutelle says, Morgan's hobby was traveling on freighters on the Mediterranean and in Europe so she could enjoy and study medieval architecture. And embedded in the structure of her magnum opus at San Simeon are numerous medieval artifacts, ceilings, mantels, statues and cornices, and hundreds of pieces of art that Hearst transported there from Europe.

According to Boutelle's book, for many years during the construction of San Simeon, Morgan left her office late Friday afternoons to board the coast train and ride 200 miles to San Luis Obispo. Then she rode by taxi 50 or so miles to arrive at San Simeon 10 or 12 hours later. There she pored over drawings in her little shack--still standing as a monument to her--and oversaw all the details of the building of San Simeon. Sunday night she returned home and was in her office early Monday morning. She worked late nights and gave the same kind of personal attention to the other projects she was commissioned for, including the projects in Saratoga and Los Gatos.

Morgan's work for the Hearsts spanned more than 35 years and included Phoebe Hearst's hacienda in Pleasanton (now the Castlewood Country Club) and an enchanting Bavarian compound of houses near Mt. Shasta. Hearst's freewheeling spending and Morgan's love of her work made for some beautiful works of art around California. There were times when Hearst didn't have the money he intended for a project, and Morgan worked for far less than she had originally agreed.

Much of Morgan's work represents a time gone by, when architecture was more like a Michelangelo painting, rich in detail, and when craftsmen knew how to create a Tiffany glaze and when patrons appreciated the artwork in a building's design and construction. But then that era was almost at an end when Morgan retired in 1951. When Morgan's work ended, so did her purpose for living.

Boutelle writes of Morgan's sad ending. Not too long after she retired, Morgan was mugged in Oakland. That experience left her somewhat feeble. After returning home from the hospital, she went into her bedroom and did not leave it for four years, until the day she died.

Boutelle says Morgan would not appreciate all the fanfare in recent years. "She admired the anonymity of the medieval artisans." However, Morgan's personal and professional papers are now stored at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo and are available for public view.

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