The elegant Grandview estate is home to owner Donald Head's world-class art collection
Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
The Collector
As a child, Donald Head spent every Saturday in the Huntington Museum. He was hooked.
By Mary Ann Cook
Photographs by Kathy De La Torre
In the Saratoga Hills is an estate that is full of such sweeping vistas and fantastic art treasures from all over the world that it's hard to believe it is real. Grandview Ranch is the name of the estate and Donald Head is its owner. It encompasses 25 acres, includes a 22-room main house and several outer buildings. There are two swimming pools, a tennis court, a six-car garage, an award-winning camellia garden, an orchard, a pool house, a workshop, a painting studio and two painting galleries. These last two, plus the main house, are chockablock full of the Head collection.
Donald Head started collecting as a child and now has a world-class collection of plein air paintings second to none in the world, except perhaps museums. "Every child should grow up with paintings," he says. "Doesn't have to be anything expensive. Can be simple, something theirs, hanging in their own room."
His plein air collection is composed chiefly of California artists--Granville Redman, Marsden Brooks, Guy Rose, Seldon Gile, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran and more. But his collection doesn't stop there: here are Asian treasures, modern sculpture, incredible antique furnishings.
One of the most exciting and one of the newest of his purchases is a sunflower sculpture. It's by Christopher Ries and is made from 1,000 pounds of optical glass, the same material that's used for orthoscopic surgery.
The sunflower offers a totally different image when seen from above, from the side, from underneath, echoing itself over and over in as many different configurations as there are angles from which to view it.
Another unusual piece, entirely removed from Head's usual realm, is a skeleton of a cave lion, found in the Ural Mountains in Russia and approximately 80,000 to 100,000 years old. It's a skeleton of the largest Ice Age predator. There's only one other in the world.
Sculpture is found at Grandview both indoors and out--from contemporaries, such as Glenna Goodacre, Fletcher Benton and famed Puerto Rican sculptor Francisco Zuniga, to older works.
All the art is housed in three separate buildings--the main house, the guest house and the painting gallery and each building has several stories. How does he decide what to put where? Professionals from art houses and museums meet with him regularly.
The art work is rotated as often as he has time to rearrange it. Individual paintings, or whole groups of paintings, are loaned to museums. He gets calls from his art manager, perhaps weekly, suggesting something he might like to buy.
Asked if he sold something when he buys something new, Head responded that, no, anything left over when something new takes its place goes into the vault.
Head is carefully generous with his time and holdings. He opens his home to art groups, museum staffs, for benefits. His estate was the setting for the precursor to the Cattle Baron's Ball five years ago. The auxiliary formed to coordinate the ball borrowed the name of his estate and named themselves the Grand View League.
This year the ball will be held at Moffett Field on Sept. 23. Some 2,000 people are expected to attend and the goal the organizers set themselves is to raise $1 million for the American Cancer Society, a goal that was reached last year. The Cattle Baron's Ball is the biggest donation producer in California for ACS.
One of the reasons for the ball's success is the graciousness of people like Donald Head. Wait. There are no other people like Donald Head, unless one recalls such recently departed figures as J.P. Getty or Norton Simon. Or historical personages such as W.R. Hearst or James Phelan.
So, suffice it to say that one of the reasons for the ball's success is simply Donald Head. Witness: one item to be auctioned off at the Cattle Baron's Ball is dinner for 50 at Grandview, valued at $6,000. Two years ago dinner for 12 at the estate drew a $35,000 bid for ACS.
Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
Donald Head stands in front of a 16th century Japanese screen of the marshlands of Tokyo. One of the auction items at the upcoming Cattle Baron's Ball is dinner for 50 at Grandview.
What dinner for 50 will bring remains to be seen. The main winner, of course, is the American Cancer Society. Secondary winners are those who can savor all the splendors of nature, art and artifacts on the premises, while being wined and dined.
Grandview's original owner was Fluor Corporation's Percy M. Pike. He patterned it after a French estate and spared no expense. Even the utilitarian firefighting apparatus behind a closed cupboard is silver-plated.
After Pike's death Grandview was bequeathed to Stanford and then gradually apportioned out to various owners. By the time Head bought it 30 years ago, the property had been neglected and was run down.
There were broken windows and wild animals roamed the outer buildings. He bought back the various portions piecemeal and ever since has been restoring it to its former glory and beyond. There is an ever-present project going on at the ranch.
All the trees on the property, except for a redwood and one other, he planted. The orchard has been planted in 720 Blenheim apricots. The camellia garden was established after he was given 550 camellia plants that were 300 years old, a gift from Gus Meier, then head of the Camellia Society of Palo Alto.
"People don't realize camellias are a tree," Head says, since they're usually topped and remain bush-sized. These camellias dwarf the viewer at twice an adult's size.
In that garden reside several Thai sculptures. Here also sits a mythical, dog-like beast made of granite from 16th-century China. If you can remove the ball from inside its mouth you will live forever goes the legend that accompanies the sculpture.
So the garden stroller is encouraged to caress the ball inside the creature's mouth in hopes of diminishing its size enough so that the sphere will fit through the beast's mouth. After five centuries? Fat chance.
He always knew he'd be a collector, Head says. He grew up in San Marino, spent every Saturday at the nearby Huntington Museum. "Every Saturday," he emphasizes. "The Huntington hooked me."
His father was vice president of Goodrich Rubber. His mother at various times had her own radio show, appeared in Pasadena Playhouse productions and taught English. And he determined early on that he would be an English teacher. Say by age 8.
He has three degrees in English--a doctorate from Vanderbilt, a master's from Stanford and a bachelors from the University of Oklahoma. During his undergraduate days he enlisted in the Naval ROTC to become an officer. Upon graduation he was a boat group commander, ferrying marines in landing crafts during the Korean War.
"After attending Stanford I knew I wanted to settle in this area," he says. But he headed south for the doctorate because Stanford grads at that time were being placed in the East. By going south he figured he'd be placed in the West.
It evidently worked out that way: he taught English at San Jose State University for 25 years; 19th-century authors was his specialty. "I taught my students to dream," he says. "Everyone needs a dream. My life is a dream made real."
Indeed, it's such a dream-like reality it seems unreal. He describes himself as a turtle, as in the tortoise and the hare fable. No quick spurts of energy and then exhaustion for him. "The tortoise won the race," he reminds.
One of Donald Head's recent acquisitions was this 1,000-pound optical glass sculpture by Christopher Ries who spent three years creating it.
Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
Persistent, consistent. One of his maxims is to be consistent without being dull. His life is constant maintenance, continually overseeing his domain. There's a dry patch in the camellia garden: a phone call is placed to the man who maintains the landscape.
Maintenance is evidenced in all areas. He exercises regularly, rigorously. He enjoys cooking--for himself and friends. He has no live-in staff. The rooms in the main house that were originally designed as servants quarters are now guest rooms.
"Do something, even if it's wrong," is his motto. And he's made many wrong moves, he says. Here's one wrong-headed decision: the upper swimming pool he added so there would be a heated pool for winter swims. It simply didn't fit in with its French-inspired surroundings.
So it was removed and another, more appropriate, one was put in.
The sunflower sculpture by Christopher Ries that he calls one of his most exciting buys is mounted on a base which rests on a floor in the lower level of the painting gallery. That floor is a replica of the one in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
It's the same pattern and the same kind of wood, but in order to make it look as though it were 400 years old it had to be distressed. It was soaked in water for days, hacked by axes and endured other tortures before being laid.
Paintings from other eras beside the plein air are in abundance and from other centuries, including the modern. Will Wilson, Childe Hassam, Andrew Wyeth, Paul Cadmus of the Ashcan school of New York painters, to name a few.
Imari porcelain, Japanese and Chinese screens, antique furniture from England and France. There's a Lalique table in the kitchen, and silver pieces from all over the world and from all different periods.
There's a first century Roman chair in the painting gallery. It's near an Arnoldo Pomodoro sculpture, the man who did the entrance to the Hague. Theodore Wores, the Saratoga artist, is represented by several works in Head's collection. There's William Ritschel, a Carmel artist whose work dominates the Monterey Art Museum.
Enter the dining pavilion in the guest house and all this comes into view: a Swedish 18th-century chandelier; Imari Japanese porcelain, Heather glass on the sliding door and window to the work space, 16th-century wooden blackamoors, representing royalty, hold light sconces.
Here one finds a dining table with leaves shaped like flower petals and with alternate sections made from a darker wood. These darker leaves can be removed to make the table smaller. The lower level of the painting gallery holds a collection of Japanese screens in one room and in another, a small theater where movies are shown nightly.
In the painting gallery an upstairs hallway with specially designed shelves is dedicated to glass sculptures from such as Dale Chihuly and two sections on one wall are devoted strictly to Steuben glass sculptures.
Head owns a presidential set of dishes from the Warren G. Harding administration. In the main house is the library, also known as the Thomas Jefferson room, since there is a bed in this library just as there is at Monticello.
The grandeur of the world of Donald Head is difficult to comprehend all at once, even when face to face with it. It takes four hours to walk completely around his holdings. Sixteen people can fit inside the fireplace in the pool house. And that's a modest-sized building in the Grandview scale of things.
"I don't want to be pretentious," says the low-key, low-profile collector. He needn't worry. It's just hard to know what to call him. Now, if there were barons in this country, in this century, Saratoga could claim Donald Head.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
