The Magnificent Builders and Their Dream Houses

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A collection of some of the most lavish, envied and admired dwellings ever created. Their stories--the palaces, mansions, cottages, and castles--and their owners are dramatically presented along with sumptuous photographs. Includes such individuals as Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Hadrian, avant garde architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Eastern potentates, inspired women such as Sarah Winchester, and great American builders such as Thomas Jefferson, the Vanderbilts and John Ringling....An intimate look at the most fantastic private homes in the world and the remarkable men and women who could afford to build as imaginatively as their fancies dictated-and did. The improbable dreams of individuals who knew what they wanted and how to get it-at any cost-have resulted in some of the most envied and admired dwellings ever created. The stories of those intriguing homes-mansions, palaces, cottages, castles-and their owners are dramatically presented, through photographs, art, and evocative text, in THE MAGNIFICENT BUILDERS. Here, in splendid visual array, are some of the most beautiful buildings ever designed: Francis I's Chambord, the Alhambra of the caliphs of Granada, John Ringling's Ca'd'Zan, the Duchess of Marlborough's Blenheim Palace. Here also you will find the unpretentious charm of handmade houses built by modern do-it-your-self dreamers. More than architecture, however, this book is about people-some of the most dynamic individualsin history as well as contemporary times: poets, kings, queens, self-made men, architects, oil barons, the idle rich, dictators, entertainers. THE MAGNIFICENT BUILDERS ventures behind the public faces to explore the private motivations of personalities as diverse as the Emperor Hadrian and Wilt Chamberlain, Mrs. Jack Gardner and Frank Lloyd Wright, the Tiger Balm King and Alva Vanderbilt. THE MAGNIFICENT BUILDERS takes readers to Marie Antoinette's "rustic" cottage in the village of Le Hameau, where she played dairymaid with a Sevres milk pail; to fabulous San Simeon, which William Randolph Hearst filled with treasures-and junk-from European palaces; to Chenonceaux, the lovely prize in a romantic rivalry between Henry II's queen, Catherine de Medicis, and his mistress, Diane de Poitiers; to the Alhambra, where Moorish caliphs. "tasted all the pleasures and forgot all the duties" of life; to Hardwick Hall, one of the stately Elizabethan mansions the Countess of Shrewsbury built with the fortunes of four successive husbands.-. -from the book jacket

Contents:
Rulers in search of glory: Louis XIV, Marie Antoinette, Henri Christophe, Philip II --
Kings for their pleasure: Hadrian, Diocletian, Ludwig II, George IV, Francis I --
Architects for themselves: Frank Lloyd Wright, Juan O'Gorman, Herbert Greene, Philip Johnson, Richard Foster, Paolo Soleri, John Soane --
Inspired women: Diane de Poitiers, Elizabeth Shrewsbury, Sarah Winchester, Sarah Churchill, Isabella Gardner --
Artists as builders: Mark Twain, Sir Walter Scott, William Gillette, Frederick Church, Peter Paul Rubens, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Horace Walpole --
Easern potentates: Darius the Great, Shah Jahan, Maharana Jagat Singh, Ibn al-Ahmar --
Princely Americans: Thomas Jefferson, Haller Nutt, The Vanderbilt family, George Boldt, John Ringling, William Randolph Hearst.