In 1891, Thomas Douglas Stimson commissioned the most expensive private residence Los Angeles had yet seen. The Michigan lumber baron and Chicago businessman had arrived in the city the previous year with a fortune, joining the wave of Midwestern capital that transformed Figueroa Street into the city's first Millionaire's Row. At $150,000, his retirement palace would anchor what the Los Angeles Times called the costliest and most beautiful mansion in the city. Architects Carroll H. Brown and E. D. Elliot brought the Richardsonian Romanesque vocabulary of Chicago to a corner lot that would become the district's defining landmark.
The 3½-story, 30-room castle rises in red sandstone, its mass punctuated by Gothic touches and crowned by a four-story crenellated octagonal tower. Brick chimneys march across the roofline, while the sandstone walls, as later events would prove, possess formidable structural integrity. Inside, each principal room received carved woodwork finished in a different species, complemented by stained glass throughout and a grand staircase. A brick carriage house, documented on the 1894 Sanborn map, survives at the rear of the property.
