THE OTHER WHITE HOUSE

1995-04-09 04:00:00 PDT HILLSGOROUGH -- HILLSBOROUGH - Legendary Bay Area architect Julia Morgan is best known for her work on the Hearst Castle in San Simeon. The extravagant Central Coast edifice was an assignment that purportedly puzzled and offended her elitist fans in the architectural community; San Simeon was a radical departure from the Morgan style of simple symmetry using wood and stone.

But Hearst Castle wasn't her only regression.

Another architectural monument - also commissioned by a Hearst family member - that defies her familiar style is an opulent 27,000-square-foot mansion tucked behind upscale tree-lined El Cerrito Street in Hillsborough.

It is dubbed the Western White House because the Georgian Colonial estate deliberately emulates the real White House - down to the blooming cherry blossoms and the library, which looks much like the famed Oval Office in Washington, D.C.

There is one difference between the two White Houses. The one in Hillsborough is on the market for $8.5 million.

Opulence in 22 rooms

The three-story, 22-room home sits on three landscaped acres. Through French doors, a trellised walkway leads to a rose garden next to an outdoor pool. Poolside, there's a white-column verandah with a bar and a dressing room that includes a dry sauna.

The home has 10 fireplaces and marble is everywhere. The walls in the grand foyer and many of the rooms on the first-floor are padded with silk coverings, which serve to sound proof the rooms. The kitchen sports six stainless steel sinks, a commercial indoor grill and two Vulcan ovens. An elevator serves the four-story mansion.

There are three magnificent cut-glass chandeliers and at least one in the dining room is a Waterford. For cleaning its hundreds of pieces of glass, Morgan cut a trap door in the third floor so that workers could raise and lower the chandelier.

No worry here about closet space. Two full rooms are devoted to storing the owner's wardrobe, with an mechanical clothes rack like you find in a dry cleaners. The current owner, Rosemary Eckersley Ashley, has one room just for ballroom gowns and another for furs.

The property is bordered by a creek on three sides and has guard-dog kennels.

Steeped in history

For home buyers who are feeling presidential and who have big bucks, this extravagant home, which is 15 times the size of an average California house, offers nearly as much Bay Area history as the White House does U.S. history.

The Hillsborough mansion was the legacy of George Hearst - eldest son of publishing giant William Randolph Heart, who had commissioned the Hearst Castle. In 1930, the younger Hearst turned to Morgan to redesign the Hillsborough property, which had been seriously damaged in a major fire three years earlier.

Before that. the Hillsborough home was owned by the Crocker family - starting with silver baron Charles Frederick Crocker who in the 1870s bought the house from the estate of cattle rancher William Henry Howard. According to records from the San Mateo County Historical Association, Howard built the colossal house in 1878 using stone carvers from Italy and using a saw mill on site to make the wood shingles on the Swiss Chalet-like design.

Owners remembered

The home was passed down through the Crocker family and sold to Burlingame contractor Charles Lundgren who physically moved the home a quarter mile away to El Cerrito Street in 1915. The relocation was to take advantage of the lush landscaping and the creek on El Cerrito Street.

Hailed as an engineering achievement, the house move was written up in Popular Mechanics magazine

It is difficult to separate lore from fact after Hearst purchased the property. Hearst purportedly intended to give the Western White House to the U.S. Government or some sort of trust for presidents to use when they visited California.

That never happened and Hearst sold the house without ever living in it.

In the 1940s, the home was purchased by a shoe tycoon family, the Gallencamps, and Nancy Ann Abbot of Storybook Doll notoriety lived in the home in the 1950s. She filled the home with presidential mementos.

Since then five different families have lived in the home, including T. Jack Foster, the founder and developer of Foster City and savings and loan heiress Nancy Burris.

According to an old newspaper account in the San Mateo Times, John and Yoko Lennon intended to buy the house in the early 1970s but they backed out of the deal at the last minute.

A transplant from the affluent beach community of Montecito near Santa Barbara, Ashley Eckersley bought the home eight years ago and has put an estimated $2 million into it, including the silk wall coverings, faux finishings and modern appliances.

She and her husband, Norman Eckersley, who is a retired banker, plan to move to The City when the home is sold.

Coldwell Banker real estate agent Anne Riley, who is handling the listing, said that the "Morgan and Hearst name and the unique White House design adds value (to such an expensive house). But it's the amenities and the modern upgrades to the plumbing, wiring and the heating system that make this historic place livable now."

The house has an elaborate solar heating system and 1,000 amps of electrical power. Despite their opulence, many other older mansions haven't gone through these upgrades.

The average price for homes sold in Hillsborough last year was slightly less than $1 million. So even for upscale Hillsborough, the Western White House must draw a uniquely qualified buyer.

I suspect that won't be too difficult. There are certainly enough super-rich people out there who want to make a particular statement through their home.

Bradley Inman is a Bay Area-based real estate writer and author of "San Francisco Bay Area: Livable Neighborhoods," a guide to affordable and unique places to call home (Foghorn Press, San Francisco, 800-842-7477, 1992, $12.95, 300 pages).<