A Rare Look Inside the Carson Mansion

Perched on a bluff in Eureka, California stands the Carson Mansion, one of the most photographed houses in the world. However, what makes today rare is not the building's survival, but the chance to step inside it, because the Carson Mansion has been a private club for more than 70 years, and its interior is something almost no one gets to see. Hi everyone, Ken here. We're going to run through the history to compare how the rooms originally appeared to how they appear today. Hit that subscribe button, and let's explore this house. To understand the house, it's important to first know a bit about the man who built it. In 1825, William Carson was born in New Brunswick, Canada, and like so many young men of his generation, he sailed for California chasing gold, arriving on the west coast around 1850. The gold never really came, but the redwoods did, and by the early 1850s, Carson had given up mining for good and turned to lumber, felling some of the first commercial redwoods on Humboldt Bay, and shipping the first loads of redwood timber south to a fast-growing San Francisco. In 1863, he made the partnership that would make him rich, joining forces with John Dolbier to form the Dolbier and Carson Lumber Company, and when Dolbier patented a steam donkey engine in 1881, a single-cylinder steam-powered winch that could drag enormous logs out of rugged country, the company's fortunes were set. Carson expanded into railroads, banks, utilities, ships, and thousands of acres of timberland, and by the time he died, he was reportedly worth around $20 million. By the early 1880s, Carson had the money to build whatever he wanted, and there is a famous story about why he built it all. The lumber market had gone soft, and Carson, rather than lay off his skilled carpenters and carvers, is said to have put them to work on his grand house instead. Historians treat this as anecdotal rather than fully documented, but it fits everything else we know about him, and even the Historic American Building Survey notes that the project was meant to put men idled by hard times back to work. The house famously took over 100 men more than two years to build. To design it, he hired the San Francisco firm of Samuel and Joseph Cather Newsome, fellow Canadian immigrants and prolific pattern book architects, and gave them, by all accounts, carte blanche to design whatever they wanted. Construction ran from 1884 to 1886, and the family moved in that October. What the Newsomes produced defies any single label. Originally, the house rose in pale colors from its bluff, a three-story redwood villa exploding upward into turrets, bays, steeply pitched gables, and a lofty central tower topped with a pyramidal roof and a balustraded widow's walk. Today, it wears the deep greens and reds of its modern paint scheme, and the effect is even more theatrical. Architectural historians have thrown every term they have at it, calling it Queen Anne, Eastlake, Stick, Italianate, and Renaissance Revival all at once, and the house is so eclectic that none of them are wrong. The tower rises to 103 feet, and the whole thing is essentially a three-dimensional advertisement for what could be done with wood. The frame, and virtually every structural and decorative member, are redwood, the material that make Carson wealthy, chosen for the exterior because it resists weather and decay so well. Look closely at the surfaces, and the eccentricity comes alive. The lower walls are clad in narrow clapboard, while the upper stories are covered in wavelike and scalloped shingle patterns. Redwood strips articulate the corners in the tower, and the vertical rhythms of the stick style. Decorative verge boards hang beneath the gable leaves, and the whole roofline bristles with brackets, medallions, and ornament. The gray porch that wraps the west and south sides is carried on bulbous, outsized, almost unique-turned posts. As we begin exploring the house, we'll compare historic photos to how each room appears today. Step through the front door, and you reach the vestibule, a squared entry that sets the tone for everything to come. The outer door is a sliding one, and the inner doors are a pair of tall wood doors fitted with stained glass and crowned by a stained glass transom above. The woodwork here, and in the stair hall just beyond, is where the nuisance let loose, a strange and wonderful local blend of Eastlake, Tudor, and Mannerist carvings that you simply do not see anywhere else. Beyond the vestibule opens the entrance hall and the grand staircase. The showpiece of the house, and the space where those out-of-town lumber buyers were meant to have their breath taken away. Here, the primavera wood comes into its own, used lavishly through the great stair hall. A massive staircase rises from a hall bench of pale primavera, up a wide stairwell that is wainscoted and balustraded in the same golden wood. All of it step beneath heavy pillars of burl redwood. The hall's raised plaster ceiling is carried on fluted primavera pedestals and urns, and interrupted by a high-carved arch supporting a screen of redwood filigree that leads the eye toward the stairs. To the right of the entry lies the parlor, the first of the home's grand public rooms. It centers on a Mexican onyx mantle, and its walls, in Carson's day, carried a rose-colored leaf-patterned paper that restores later reproduced faithfully. Two great rosettes on the ceiling hold alabaster chandeliers, and the cornice trim glows in a careful palette of ashes of roses, dark rose, blue-green, and butter-yellow. Colors match from a pair of French pistachioettes found in storage. Across the entry sits the room often called the living room or music room, and it may be the single most magical space in the house. Its centerpiece is a one-of-a-kind stained-glass window showing a woman in a flowing gown, set above an onyx mantle enframed in leaf-carved Philippine mahogany that rises to a towering wooden cornice. The clever trick is that the window sits exactly where a chimney should be, so the flue is deliberately diverted to make room for the glass. Deeper into the first floor waits the dining room, a perennial, wainscoted space. The heavy oak side-boarded buffet, with their beveled mirrors, survive, and so does the original oak dining table, which seats fourteen beneath a cast bronze and molded glass fixture, with a second round table by the south windows for still more guests. Sliding doors six feet across and heavy velvet portier drapes once let the dining room, music room, and parlor be joined or closed off in a suite of private dining spaces. Climb the stairs, and you arrive at the second floor hall, which many people have called the strangest and most beautiful feature of the whole house. Four horseshoe arches lend the space an unmistakably Moorish air, lit only by the light spilling from the stairwell and its stained glass. The arches look for all the world like carved wood, but they are actually cast plaster, painted in Carson's time with a false grain so convincing that even club members have assumed they were stripped natural timber. Also on this floor is Sarah Carson's bedroom, sometimes called the library, a comparatively intimate room that speaks to family life rather than showing off. The tour ends up on the third floor, where the house turned to leisure. Here, Carson placed a ballroom, and beside it, a billiard room. The billiard room still holds Carson's own slate table, ring by rings of cue racks, its wing scouting concealing an old embossed paper meant to resemble cowhide. The Carson family held the house until 1950. William's eldest son, Milton, and his wife Mary Bell lived there for some three decades after his death, and it was their daughter who finally sold it. Rather than let the great house fall to demolition, two Eureka businessmen, J.H. Crothers and Carl Gustafson, secured an option to buy it for $35,000 and with other local leaders founded the Ingimar Club when it incorporated in 1950. It still owns and occupies the mansion today, using it for dining, meetings, and social gatherings. And since 1988, it has poured enormous care into an authentic restoration, matching original wallpapers, carpets, and paint colors room by room. That private stewardship is exactly why the interior is so rarely seen, and also why it survives in such extraordinary condition. And with that, I'll turn it over to you. What did you think about the Carson Mansion? Let me know down below in the comment section, and while you're there, make sure you're subscribed so you never miss an exciting episode of This House.