A luxurious presentation in all-new photography of the most splendid estates and mansions of the Golden State. California Splendor, a lavish, beautifully produced, large-format volume, presents iconic California houses dating from the Leland Stanford Mansion in Sacramento of 1857 to publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst's palatial castle in San Simeon, completed after decades of construction in 1947. The book is comprehensive in its treatment, presenting to the reader a rediscovery and fresh exploration of the state's great architectural offerings and showcasing the very best, in styles ranging from Spanish Colonial Revival, English Revival, and Mission Revival to Adobe, Monterey Colonial, and Italianate Victorian. Lovingly featured are such magnificent homes as the Arts and Crafts masterpiece of architects Charles and Henry Greene-the Gamble House-a work of subtle refinement and mysterious charm built for a Cincinnati businessman who longed for warm summer breezes and the fragrance of orange blossoms. The reader also finds here the extraordinary Filoli House and Garden, the Henry Huntington Mansion, the Spreckels Mansion, Casa del Herrero, and Carolands, to name only a few. More potent and powerful in our imagination than any one house is the dream, the aspiration to happiness and grandeur embodied by them all-a dream brought down to earth and to which we have been invited in California Splendor.

From the private to the historic to the state-of-the-art, a lavish tour of some of the most notable stables in the country. A celebration of horses and their "lodgings," this exquisite book covers horse country across the United States--from the East Coast to the Bluegrass, the prairie and mountain ranches, and to the Pacific Coast--and traces the origins of twenty-five stunning stables, from their vernacular beginnings in the early nineteenth century to the contemporary designs of today. Included are a farm in the countryside near Saratoga Springs, New York, which bears an 1830s-constructed main barn that originally housed draft horses and now accommodates retired race horses turned polo ponies, and a world-renowned Arabian horse-breeding farm in Santa Ynez Valley, California, that resembles a spa and country club with Mediterranean-style architecture and landscaping and has in the stable courtyard a stone fountain reminiscent of the ubiquitous waterworks in Moorish palaces. Uniquely spectacular, each selection is a reflection of its regional heritage. Featuring all-new color photography, "Stables" showcases the best of America's diverse equine homes--a must-have for any horse or architecture enthusiast.

The aura and romance of Old California lives on in this treasury of inviting homes. The California House presents the magic of the "golden state," that land of infinite promise and dreams, the most tangible expression of which can be found in the homes built by early California dreamers. Here domestic visions of tranquility and repose were inventively realized-in stucco or stone, wood and wrought iron, plaster, and glass and tile. Spanish Colonial Revival-style homes with elaborate wrought-iron window grilles, romantic, shadowy interiors, and lush courtyard gardens stand beside other particularly Californian architectural wonders such as the San Francisco Victorian Painted Lady, the Monterey Colonial, Eurekan Queen Anne, and the homey California Arts & Crafts. Including houses designed by luminaries George Washington Smith, Stanford White, Greene & Greene, and Reginald Johnson, this book will fascinate both the architecture aficionado and interior design enthusiasts, as well as the everyday lover of homes. Including, but going beyond, the much-adored Spanish style (in its many manifestations) and Mission Revival, the book features as well the Victorian of San Francisco's Painted Lady and Eureka's Queen Anne, Monterey Colonial, California Arts & Crafts, French Chateau, classic Colonial farm house, and more. All new color photography of 25 houses in California ranging in style from Spanish Colonial Revival, Mission, Victorian, Queen Anne, California Arts & Crafts, Monterey, French Chateau, Colonial Farm House. The book includes little known California work by well known architect Stanford White, known primarily for his East Coast work (designer of the original Penn Station with McKim, Mead & White, and original Madison Square Garden, and many others); as well as the Magdelena Zanone House (Queen Anne late Victorian style home in Eureka, CA); the Murphy House, San Francisco (Classic French Chateau); a Gothic Victorian 1860s home in Sonoma; Casa Amesti (Monterey style home); "El Cerrito" designed by Russel Ray and Winsor Soule and built in 1913 in Santa Barbara (an amalgam of Mission and Spanish Colonial Revival); the Frothingham House designed by George Washington Smith in 1922 (Spanish Colonial Rev.); Cuartro Ventos House by Reginald Johnson, 1929 in Santa Barbara; William Edwards House by Roland E. Coate, Sr. in San Marino, 1926; Robinson House by Greene and Greene in Pasadena, 1905; Sack House in Berkeley (California Arts & Crafts) Brune-Reutlinger House in San Francisco (classic Painted Lady Victorian); a colonial mid-19th cent farm house in Sonoma; "Mariposa," classic Spanish style in Montecito; The Marston House in San Diego (Arts & Crafts/Tudoresque); Rancho Los Alamos De Santa Elena in Los Alamos (Span. Col. Rev.); Pepper Hill Farm in Balard.