Huntington Given a 320-Year-Old Japanese House

Magistrate's House, built in the 1690s, Marugame, Japan. Photo by Hiroyuki Nakayama. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

The Huntington plans to install an Edo period magistrate's residence from Marugame, Japan, in its Japanese garden. The acquisition, a gift of Yokho and Akira Yokoi, has been in the works since 2016.

The Huntington has a five-room Japanese house plus a small teahouse, both 20th century. The former was commissioned from Japan craftsmen about 1904, during an American craze for Japanese tea gardens, and shipped to Pasadena. Henry Huntington bought it from the original owner, George Turner Marsh (who was also responsible for the tea garden in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park).

The magistrate's residence is an authentic 320-year-old home with a well-documented history. The Huntington's garden director James Folsom says "there's nothing quite like this in any public garden in North America." The magistrate's residence functioned as a town hall as well as a stately home. The installation at the Huntington is to include outbuildings and reproduce the residence's gardens. It's expected that the project will cost about $9 million, with most of that now raised, and that the home will open to visitors by early 2021.

Magistrate's House, built in the 1690s, Marugame, Japan. Photo by Hiroyuki Nakayama. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

UPDATE. A reader asked whether the magistrate's home, once installed, would be the oldest building in California. The San Juan Capistrano Mission (1782) is described as the oldest surviving building in California. There are 18th-century period rooms at the Getty and LACMA (the 1766-67 Damascus Room, not on view), but they're not complete structures. The Getty Villa, a recreation of a 2000-year-old building, hardly counts.

In the comments, Zack mentions the Abbey of New Clairvaux in Vina, Calif. In 1931 William Randolph Hearst bought much of the Cistercian monastery of Santa Maria de Ovila, Spain. He had it disassembled stone by stone, with the intention of recreating parts of it in his Wyntoon Castle near Mount Shasta. Hearst ran out of money during the Depression and ended up donating the stones to the city of San Francisco, so they could be used to construct a Museum of Medieval Arts that would rival New York's Cloisters museum. Nothing came of that either. The de Young Museum reconstructed the church portal (a later part of the monastery, built in a Renaissance style) and displayed it for several years. The portal is now installed at the University of San Francisco.

Ultimately many of the stones were given to the Abbey of New Clairvaux, a working Cistercian monastery in Northern California. The Abbey has reconstructed the 800-year-old Spanish Gothic chapter house. However many stones had been damaged or lost, and they no longer had the numbers that were intended to facilitate reconstruction. It's said that about 60 percent of the chapter house's stones are old, and they aren't necessarily positioned as they were originally.

Abbey of New Clairvaux, Vina, Calif. Reconstruction of chapter house of Santa Maria de Ovila, Spain

Bottom line: The New Clairvaux chapter house is less "authentic" that the Huntington's magistrate's home will likely be, but its elements are about 500 years older.

Magistrate's House, built in the 1690s, Marugame, Japan. Photo by Hiroyuki Nakayama. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens