Winchester Mystery House

For nearly 100 years the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, has stood as a testament to the ingenuity, singular vision and lore that surrounds its namesake, Sarah Pardee Winchester (heiress to the Winchester Repeating Arms fortune). Originally known as Llanada Villa, today it stands as an architectural wonder, a time capsule of a bygone era and one of America’s most alleged haunted mansions. Sarah Winchester was a true woman of independence, drive, and courage who lives on in legend as a grieving widow who continuously built onto her initially small, two-story farmhouse to appease the spirits of those killed by the guns manufactured by her husband’s firearms company. The mansion is renowned for its many design curiosities, innovations (many ahead of their time) and rumored paranormal activity. From 1884 to 1922 construction seemingly never ceased as the original eight-room farmhouse grew into the world’s most unusual and sprawling mansion, featuring: • 24,000 square feet • 10,000 windows • 2,000 doors • 160 rooms • 52 skylights • 47 stairways & fireplaces • 17 chimneys

• 13 bathrooms • 9 kitchens The mansion was built at a price-tag of a then astronomical sum of roughly $5,000,000. In 1884, Mrs. Winchester moved from New Haven, Connecticut, to San Jose, California, and started building what is now considered one of America’s most peculiar grand residences. For 38 years thereafter, Mrs. Winchester had a staff of gardeners,

domestics, woodworkers, plasterers, tile setters and plumbers working on the estate ensuring that the grounds and home were constantly in a state of becoming. Designed in the most fashionable architectural style of that time, American Queen Anne Revival, the Winchester Mystery House (or Llanada Villa) features turrets, asymmetrical facade, witches’ caps, balconies, finials, generous porches, a monumental stone chimney, and lots of fanciful wooden ornamentation, often called “gingerbread”. The house once stood seven stories high which included an impressive tower that entirely collapsed during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Today the home stands at four stories high. For the interior and exterior ornamentation and design of

her house, Sarah Winchester drew on her travels as a young woman, most notably the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the Aestheticism Movement – the adaptation and blending of decor from many cultures with an emphasis on nature which helped give rise to the modern interior design. The interior decor of the Winchester Mystery House shows influences from a number of diverse cultures: Persian, Moorish, Egyptian, and most importantly— Japanese. Design motifs of flowers, leaves, insects,

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birds, spider webs, and sunbursts, sure signs of Aesthetic decor, can be spied throughout the mansion. The Winchester Mystery House showcases one of the world’s foremost collections of antique art glass windows, doors inlaid with German silver and bronze, and rooms filled with the lost graciousness from another time. The ballroom alone is filled with beauty from floor to ceiling: from the elegant gold and silver chandelier to the highly polished inlaid parquet ballroom floor. As beautiful as the house appears, Mrs. Winchester never worked from blueprints or formalized designs. This resulted in the creation of a residence where cabinets open to walls, doorways lead to plummets many stories below, stairs that go straight to the ceiling and rooms built within rooms. Whether these designs were intentional or accidental remains a mystery. The number 13 is also prominently featured

in the design and decor of the house such as ceilings with 13 panels, rooms with 13 windows, staircases with 13 steps and even 13 bathrooms. Other design oddities include posts installed upside down and a front door without an outside door handle. According to legend only Mrs. Winchester and the carpenters that installed the front doors were the only ones to ever pass through its threshold. Visitors will also notice areas on the exterior of the house where the woodwork is painted black, an indication that this portion of the facade was never finished before Mrs. Winchester’s passing in 1922. Although Mrs. Winchester is gone, work on her mansion continues today where artisans and craftsmen are constantly restoring, refurbishing, and working in the same precise detail as they did during her stay at the house. Entry halls and dining rooms are presently being restored, utilizing century-old techniques and practices, including the use of over 100-year old original Lincrusta wallpaper found in the mansions many storage rooms. The Winchester Mystery House is located at 525 S. Winchester Blvd. in San Jose, California, between Highways I-880 and I-280, and is open daily to the public and group events. Additional information can be found at www.winchestermysteryhouse.com.