SARATOGA — It’s the latest in Silicon Valley real estate: your own chateau, built by winemaker Paul Masson to entertain his chums.
And you can have it for $7 million — not a bad price, given the dizzying state of the Silicon Valley market.
The hilltop estate sits on 3-plus acres and has its own vineyards, along with towering redwoods and oaks. And it comes with a bonus: plenty of history.
“The great room has all this energy,” said co-owner Jane Asher, describing the cavernous entertaining space where Masson once sat before the fire and regaled his guests. “I see people drinking, having parties — I imagine Paul Masson sitting there with a cigar and a glass of wine, and kind of ‘Donald Trumping’ everybody.”
An early power broker of the California wine industry, Masson patterned his Saratoga chateau — which he built late in life, in 1936 — after his childhood home in Burgundy, France. A famous raconteur, his circle of friends included Charlie Chaplin (said to have had his own designated wine spigot across the road at the Paul Masson Mountain Winery), John Steinbeck (who lived in nearby Monte Sereno) and former President Herbert Hoover (based in Palo Alto by the mid-1930s).
“If the walls could talk, we would hear a lot of interesting things,” said Patricia Anderson, the Coldwell Banker real estate agent who has listed the property, on Pierce Road in the hills above downtown Saratoga.
Asher and her husband, Jim, are the fourth owners of the 4,897-square-foot chateau, which has been substantially modernized while retaining its Old World aura with a storybook turret and slated mansard roof. It has four bedrooms, three baths, a wine cellar and an updated kitchen with antique butcher block counters imported from France. Not to mention the great room, with its 16-foot ceilings and a fireplace that nearly spans an entire wall.
The views of the surrounding hills are particularly impressive from inside the turret, where, as the story goes, Masson’s daughter, Adele, would sit and play the organ, gazing out the window, taking in the scenery and keeping an eye on the arriving guests.
Perhaps she was suspicious of them: Adele was a teetotaler, as was Masson’s wife, Louise. That’s why the family didn’t live in the chateau. Instead, they kept a quiet home in San Jose, and Masson — who seems to have been a carouser — would head off to the hills to entertain friends.
“I feel sorry for him,” said Annette Stransky, president of the Saratoga Historical Foundation. Faced with a prohibitionist wife and daughter, the “jovial and extroverted” vintner “apparently used the Saratoga home as a venue for events, because he liked to entertain people, and he had a very lavish style of eating and drinking and bringing high-level people into his circle. And that was a really good way of marketing his wine at the time.”
Much of the entertaining went on at La Cresta, an even older chateau built by Masson on the grounds of his winery. (It still stands beside the patio where concertgoers dine before shows at the Mountain Winery.)
La Cresta was the site of actress Anna Held’s notorious champagne bath of 1917, a marketing ploy to promote Masson’s line of sparkling wine, a risque event for its time. Asher has heard stories vaguely alluding to debaucherous parties in the great room of the 1936 chateau: “I don’t know a lot about what else they did; maybe I don’t want to know.”
The better part of a century later, the Ashers often have entertained in that same room: cozy winter get-togethers in front of the fireplace.
The chateau, Anderson emphasized, “is a living, breathing house.” She imagines its next life: as a family home, a second-home getaway or a corporate retreat. “It’s not a museum.”
Its history, however, is part of the package.
In the kitchen, she laid the chateau’s original architectural plans across a counter. Titled “Hunting Lodge for Paul Masson,” they were signed by San Francisco-based Henry C. Smith, who was known in his day as “The Hilltop Architect” because of his talent for situating homes on hilly terrain. This one served a dual function: as a place for Masson to entertain and as a base for the winemaker and his hunting buddies to head out into the hills, which were filled in those days with boar, pheasant and quail.
During their 19 years in the chateau, the Ashers, who are moving to Carmel Valley, have added a wing that seamlessly matches the exterior — quite a feat, as Masson built his lodge out of bricks recovered from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. When Asher added the wing, she searched the country for bricks that would easily blend. It took awhile, but she found them in Portland, Oregon, had them trucked to Saratoga, and flew in a specialist from Kansas City, Missouri, to replicate the original mortar. “It was one of my big things.”
She and Anderson pointed out other original features: the weather vane rooster perched atop the turret; the wrought iron balconies, designed with heart motifs; the massive weathered doors that lead to the great room.
“I love those doors,” Asher said. “People say, ‘Why didn’t you paint them?’ I say, ‘No, that’s my history.’ “
Contact Richard Scheinin at 408-920-5069, read his stories at www.mercurynews.com/richard-scheinin and follow him at Twitter.com/RealEstateRag.
