Take a moment to imagine a week of waking up to a view of Half Moon Bay beyond manicured acres and fragrant floral gardens, a maid making her way across the lawn from the servants quarters to the two hundred and fifty year old Plantation Home to make a beautiful tropical breakfast accompanied by gentle musings carried on the sea breeze from a music house in keeping with the English Colonial style. Now, imagine if this fantastical week turned into a year… ten years… the end of days. For eleven and a half million American dollars this could cease to be a dream.
Wooden floors in their angular geometrics compliment white plantation shutters that serve to usher the English Colonial style indoors. Each of the bedrooms reveal a white four-poster bed with a floral canopy and corresponding shades in soft furnishings. The delicate bed-frames effectively communicate with wicker furniture that inhabits the vast living spaces, lit by a very deliberate selection of lamps and antique chandeliers. What lingers within Mellon Estate's interior spaces is an integrity of style, a sense that the collection housed within is part of a greater narrative and in no way, contrived.
Historical in both design and story, the Mellon Estate owes perhaps its most attractive feature (its gardens) to the former owner. A horticulturalist and close friend of the Kennedys, Rachel Mellon is famed for her style in creating the White House Rose Garden, a style that so appealed to former First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, that she was asked to take her practiced hand to the East Garden of the White House in 1965.
