Harold Lloyd Estate - Landscape Architecture - Gardens

Gardens

A.E. Hanson, Lloyd's landscape architect, transformed the 15-acre (61,000 m2) site with the Villa Lante and Villa Medici as inspiration in Mediterranean Revival and Spanish Revival style motifs. The Los Angeles Times published a full-page illustrated article describing it as a "gorgeous fairyland playground" and a "Modern Eden of groves and gardens." The elaborated design of the grounds' landscape and gardens included the following elements:

• A private nine-hole regulation golf course.
• A 900-foot (270 m) canoe stream stocked with trout and bass, and a 100-foot (30 m) waterfall that plummeted into the canoe stream.
• The largest swimming pool in Southern California, measuring 50 feet (15 m) by 150 feet (46 m), and said to be "one of the finest swimming pools in the west." (The pool was surrounded by a tunnel with underwater windows to view and photograph swimmers.)
• Numerous gardens, including small tropical forests, sunken gardens, formal gardens, rose gardens, Italian gardens, and terraced gardens.
• Stables for horses, cattle and sheep, and a small farm for the estate's fruits and vegetables, including greenhouses for growing flowers.
• An open-air theater and dancing pavilion.
• Tennis courts, an outdoor bowling green, and a handball court. (Lloyd was a national handball champion and reportedly spent many hours there.)
• An automobile entrance court designed as a 120-foot (37 m) square, surrounded on two sides by a cloister.

So massive was the landscaping project that 3,500 tons of sandstone were taken from quarries in Chatsworth and trucked to the site for use in building the steps, terraces, and waterfalls.

One of the unusual features was the separate fairyland estate that Lloyd and A.E. Hanson designed for Lloyd's four-year-old daughter, Mildred Gloria. The play village had its own private gate with a sign reading, "Come into my garden and play." The fairyland estate included a four-room miniature old English house, a miniature old English stable with a pony and cart, Great Dane dogs, a wishing well with water for the daughter's garden, a slide, acrobatic devices and a swing. The miniature house had electricity and a kitchen and bath with running water, where the Lloyds' daughter played with friends, including Shirley Temple.