For half a century, a French palace has sat unchanged on a Santa Barbara bluff, its enigmatic owner spending millions of dollars to preserve the mansion as it had been in her youth. Now, after all these years, visitors can finally go inside of it.

LA Times travel writer Chris Reynolds joined Lisa McRee on “LA Times Today” with more on the mysteries of Bellosguardo. 

William Andrews Clark, a billionaire who made his fortune in mining and railroads, bought the Bellosguardo mansion in 1923. His daughter, Huguette Clark, and her mother continued to vacation at the estate after he died. 

“In the early 1930s, when the country was in a depression, Huguette and her mom decided to level the Italianate mansion that was there and build a French mansion because they were partial to all things French. And that’s why a place with an Italian name, Bellosguardo, is actually a French palace. And so through the 1920s, 30s, 40s and early 50s, Huguette and her mom would go to this mansion and they would play music together. They would paint. They had this kind of idyllic, isolated lifestyle,” Reynolds said. 

After Huguette Clark’s mother died in the 1960s, she stopped visiting the Santa Barbara mansion. But she spent a lot of her money keeping it intact in her absence. 

“She just decided to keep it the way it was, which meant about $40,000 a month in maintenance to keep the staff going and even keep the dog house there after the dog died,” Reynolds shared. 

Huguette Clark had a great interest in dollhouses and commissioning custom dolls. She kept that passion alive even as she spent the last two decades of her life in a New York hospital.

“It was the early 1990s when she was forced to go to a hospital because she had cancer that had not been diagnosed and her face was disfigured. They took her to a hospital. And even though they successfully arrested the cancer, she didn’t want to leave. And so for more than 20 years, the last 20 years of her life, she lived basically in that hospital room, relying on her nurse and other employees to be her conduits to the outside world,” Reynolds said. 

Now, 13 years after Huguette Clark’s death, her Santa Barbara mansion is open for tours. 

“It’s $100 for a tour that lasts about 90 minutes. And it looks like they’re about to start increasing the options. So there will be perhaps a couple of different tours you can take,” Reynold said. “Go to the Bellosguardo Foundation’s website and you click to go on to their mailing list and then every couple of months they release a new batch of passes to sign up for the tours.”

Watch the full interview above.

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