West Adams Mansion: If Only These Walls Could Talk

"Roehrig built the 42-room, 10,000-square-foot home with a Tudor Revival exterior, a Craftsman interior and large bay windows overlooking the garden and a coach house. However, the Ramsey family didn't live there long. After many lavish parties, quarrels, a shooting and a suicide--of which no details survive--they moved out."

"That's when novelist, playwright and film director Rupert Hughes--an uncle of Howard Hughes--and his second wife, Adelaide, leased the place. Soon producers and directors, Rupert Hughes' friends, came to film their wedding scenes on the grand stairway landing, where light filters through Art Nouveau stained-glass windows. Charlie Chaplin shot scenes for a silent film on the front lawn."

"When a Los Angeles socialite named Nellie McGaughey Durfee died more than two decades ago, her West Adams district mansion, like Durfee herself, passed from the secular world into the hands of God. But the 93-year-old mansion that now is Villa Maria, a residence for the Brothers of St. John of God, had an air of anything but sanctity."

A 42-room Tudor Revival mansion in Los Angeles's West Adams district was built in 1908 by lumber baron William E. Ramsey. Designed by architect Frederick Roehrig, the 10,000-square-foot home featured Craftsman interiors and Art Nouveau stained-glass windows. The Ramsey family vacated after experiencing scandals including a shooting and suicide. In the 1920s, novelist and filmmaker Rupert Hughes leased the property, hosting prominent Hollywood figures who filmed scenes there, including Charlie Chaplin. After Hughes's wife died in 1923, socialite Nellie McGaughey Durfee acquired the mansion. Upon her death decades later, the property was converted into Villa Maria, a residence for the Brothers of St. John of God.

Read at Los Angeles Times