Venture capital investor Ted Kruttschnitt and his wife, Alexia, spent nearly a decade planning and building their 12.5-acre estate in the unincorporated California town of , about 17 miles south of San Francisco, in the ’s , where Randolph Hearst, Bing Crosby, and Elon Musk all once maintained grand residences.

The philanthropic couple were quite specific in their likes and dislikes and, according to the Wall Street Journal, supplied their architect, Andrew Skurman of , with a 15-page list of features they would like and another six pages of things they would not like.

The result, completed in 2010, was inspired by the aristocratic gardens of Italy’s Lake Como as well as the work of George Washington Smith, an early 20 th -century American architect known for his Spanish Colonial Revi

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