From boyhood, future media mogul William Randolph Hearst loved camping at the quarter-million-acre wilderness that his father, mining millionaire George Hearst, owned near San Simeon on the California coast, midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. But the grown-up William decided that he preferred ceilings and beds to tents and sleeping bags. So he called his architect, Julia Morgan: “I would like to build a little something.” (more…)

Nestled among the tallest mountains in Spain, just outside Granada, is an exquisite palace-cum-fortress that represents the high-water mark of Islamic architectural achievement in Western Europe. The Alhambra was built by a succession of Moorish kings in the Nasrid dynasty, beginning with Muhammad I in the 13th century. (more…)

By the time, in 1910, that Julius Drewe commissioned Sir Edwin Lutyens to design his Devon retreat; the architect had become a society favourite, working with the garden designer Gertrude Jekyll to create idyllic, sprawling houses for the new moneyed classes. Drewe wanted a modern interpretation of the traditional family seat. (more…)

One of the most outstanding buildings of the Arts and Crafts era, Red House was built for William Morris by Philip Webb. One of Webb’s overriding principles was the use of vernacular, which he put into practice in his designs for Red House. He followed Morris’s own maxim that one should have nothing in one’s home not known to be useful or believed to be beautiful. (more…)

The great Gothic Revivalist Augustus Pugin is best known for his decorative design work at the Houses of Parliament in London, but this small house with its adjacent church has in its own way been just as remarkable and influential. Pugin was becoming widely recognized as an architect and polemical writer on design when he drew up plans for his own family residence atop a cliff at the western edge of the Channel port of Ramsgate. (more…)

In 1825 Frederick William III of Prussia purchased an estate south of Sanssouci Park as a gift for the Crown Prince Frederick William. The estate already had an 18thy century manor house, which was remodeled jointly by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and the Crown Prince to create the Charlottenhof Palace. Schinkel was abroad while much of the reconstruction work was underway, so his assistant, Ludwig Persius, supervised the project. (more…)