The house, a French palace on a Santa Barbara bluff, stands as undisturbed as a crime scene, a pair of unstrung harps in the music room, china laid out on the dinner table, waves crashing on East Beach below. This is the mansion that heiress Huguette Clark left behind — well, one of them. For half a century, as Clark (1906-2011) paid an estimated $40,000 per month to keep it unchanged, the coveted estate known as Bellosguardo remained no livelier than the cemetery next door.
But now outsiders trickle in. For the last year and a half, the Bellosguardo Foundation has been quietly offering ground-floor tours for $100 a head, and it may soon open up more of the long-idle estate to visitors. For anyone fascinated by great estates, robber barons, generational wealth or just human psychology, the tour is a chance to see territory that’s been off-limits for decades.
It’s also a haunting illustration of what money can buy and what it can’t. “We used to come to the cemetery and peek over the wall,” confessed Patti Gibbs, a longtime Santa Barbara resident who was among those on hand for the 10 a.m.
tour one recent Wednesday. “I’ve been waiting for them to let me in since I read the book years ago,” said visitor Peggy Simmons of Ojai. The book she mentioned is “Empty Mansions,” by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr.
, which lays out the history of the Clarks and their homes in California, New York and Connecticut. But stepping into the story is different from readi.