Not only did Phoebe Apperson Hearst help introduce Morgan to the YWCA, she also is believed to have connected the architect with her son, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. When he decided to build a Japanese-influenced bungalow on his sweeping property above the Pacific in central California, he tapped Morgan. Soon he changed his mind about the bungalow and instead envisioned a Mediterranean Revival-style castle.



This pattern continued for the next 20-plus years of their collaboration on Hearst Castle; Hearst constantly asked for changes, which most architects detest, and Morgan took it in stride. “I will do my very best to keep the cost down, but as you know, both the times and the local conditions are full of uncertainties,” she wrote to him presciently in September 1919.

She would expertly tweak the plans when he suddenly opted to add a wing or, say, enlarge the Neptune Pool, which happened twice after its initial construction in 1924. “You can tell she was really fast on her feet when things would change,” says Page & Turnbull’s Tom Dufurrena. Morgan’s organized, disciplined mind helped her to stay ahead of Hearst’s whims.

As a result, the castle is the highlight of the state parks system, attracting 750,000 visitors a year from all over the world. (The 1941 movie Citizen Kane, very loosely based on Hearst’s life, also helped make Hearst Castle famous, although it wasn't filmed there and takes many liberties with the facts.) Morgan and Hearst worked on the project together for more than two decades, starting at a time when, as Kastner points out, Morgan didn't even have the right to vote in national elections. She would often take the night train down from San Francisco and then be driven more than an hour up a winding dirt road to the hilltop estate, which Hearst called “La Cuesta Encantada.”

Morgan tended to de-formalize even the most formal of spaces, lending this dramatic castle filled with antiquities a surprisingly intimate air. There is no grand staircase or imposing foyer at Hearst Castle. Instead,a tiled entryway leads directly into the paneled Assembly Room, once used for dancing and, on quieter nights, card games around the hearth. Fireplaces were a favorite detail of hers—Hearst Castle has 30 of them in the main building alone.

She loved pools, too. As a counterpart to the Neptune Pool, Morgan also designed the Castle’s cerulean Roman Pool, a showstopping indoor swimming area that might as well have been rescued from the lost city of Atlantis. Almost every surface is covered with Italian-inspired mosaics made from 1-by-1-inch Venetian glass tiles, some infused with 22-karat gold. Marble ladders curl up from the water’s gleaming surface like seahorses, while alabaster lamps emit a ghostly glow. It’s a space of pure delight designed by an unfettered imagination and built by the world’s best craftsmen, and no one who sees it forgets it. “The Roman Pool shows what Julia Morgan could do when she didn’t have to design around all those changes,” says Kastner.

