Fabulous luxury, tiny staircases and doors to nowhere: San Jose, California’s historic 160-room Winchester Mystery House is gloriously eccentric
- Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester rifle business in the 19th century, converted a farmhouse into an enormous, sprawling mansion
- A tour of the house takes in 110 rooms, some with stairways and doors leading nowhere, and modern gadgets of the time
Those who have experienced England’s stately homes or France’s chateaux may sniff at the idea of visiting a historic country house in relatively young California, a destination more associated with surfing, showbiz and Silicon Valley than the sober contemplation of antiquities.
The name of San Jose’s Winchester Mystery House also has a suspiciously theme-park flavour, as if engineered for entertainment, and so it’s no surprise to learn that its current executive director, Walter Magnuson, came from Walt Disney, the ultimate theme-park operator.
But he rejects any suspicion of inauthenticity. “We have to take the history seriously,” he says.
His research shows that the local press had labelled the sprawling, architecturally quirky mansion as mysterious long before the 1922 death of its creator, and before it opened to the public as the “House of Mystery” a century ago, in 1923.
How an incomplete eight-room farmhouse ended up as a 160-room mansion, with 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, 13 bathrooms and 17 chimneys, is indeed a story worth hearing.
