Mansion’s New Owners Hope to Make Landmark Their Livelihood

PIRU —  Before they moved back West, Keith and Tammy Coburn lived in a modest, ranch-style house near Alabama’s Gulf Coast.

She, 34, did the weather for a nearby television station. He, 32, worked as a golf pro. Their new home in Ventura County’s agricultural Santa Clara Valley is eight times the size of their former dwelling, an opulent monument to the Victorian era.

Their electric and water bills have increased to $1,000 and $1,500 a month. And they have had to assume far more responsibility than the average homeowner, whose duties center on putting out the trash and mowing the lawn.

They are guardians of a 14-room historical trove and serve as modern links to a colorful century marked by religious fundamentalism and gilded age excess.

They are the fourth owners of the 107-year-old Piru Mansion.

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The landmark estate on nine acres most recently belonged to the renowned Santa Clarita newspaper barons Scott and Ruth Newhall, who moved there in 1968.

When the irreverent Scott Newhall, former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and Newhall Signal, and a descendant of Santa Clarita Valley pioneers, died in 1992, his widow put the house on the market.

The Coburns bought it last fall for $2.47 million raised through personal savings and help from family and other sources. They quit their jobs and moved in Dec. 15.

Why was this couple handpicked to carry the torch, rather than the Hollywood celebrities and wealthy businesspeople who flirted with buying the mansion?

“They had the money,” Ruth Newhall said dryly from her new home in Valencia. Turning serious, she added, “They seemed to be very interested in carrying on the tradition of having community events there.”

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Keith Coburn, who grew up in Calabasas, agreed. “The Newhall family looked for people who would maintain the integrity and history of the house,” he said.

The Coburns seem unlikely keepers of the flame when compared with the home’s worldly and wealthy previous owners.

The welcome mat at their side door reads, “A golfer and a normal person live here.” They do not display the no-price-too-high eccentricity that prompted religious-book publisher and original owner David C. Cook to plant exotic biblical fruit trees in the backyard, and later led Scott Newhall to import rare replicas of lampposts created for Queen Elizabeth’s 1952 coronation.

The pair, who are expecting their first child in June, are amiable and upbeat as they sit in the mansion’s imposing dining room discussing their new livelihood--the charity events, weddings and photo shoots they hold at the house, many for a fee.

A cordless phone rings almost incessantly, with most callers inquiring about the home’s availability.

Ruth Newhall acknowledges the Coburns’ right to make a living off the house, but notes that that was never the goal of previous owners.

“We never made a cent out of it,” she said. “It was our home and that was it.”

The Coburns concede they had not exactly been in the market for a multimillion-dollar home.

Then, last spring, Tammy Coburn was sitting in her newsroom in Mobile, Ala., recalling the long commute she took years before, along California 126, from her home in Sylmar to her job as a meteorologist at KEYT-TV in Santa Barbara. Punctuating her daydreams was that mansion on the hill.

The couple soon discovered the home was on the market and figured they could buy the property and make a go of it with long hours and hard work.

Kim Hocking, Ventura County’s staff consultant to the Cultural Heritage Board, said more and more owners of historically significant homes are exploring profit-making uses for them as a means of preservation.

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“It’s the same thing they had in England with all of their mansions and castles,” Hocking said. As the structures grow older, costs to maintain them rise--often beyond the means of even wealthy owners.

When asked about the couple’s finances, Tammy Coburn responded with examples: She and Keith, not a cleaning service, scrub the house from floor to ceiling once a week. They do the interior decorating themselves.

Finding the right furniture is just one of the tasks involved in keeping up the mansion’s individually themed rooms, many of which feature redwood and mahogany paneling, intricately patterned stained-glass windows and colored tile.

Cook hired well-known West Coast architects Sam and Joseph Newsom to design the Queen Anne-style house for $50,000--a lot of money then. Construction lasted from 1886 to 1891.

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The mansion contains a multitude of flourishes illustrating the period’s melding of classicism with modernism. Although the building materials--dark woods, sandstone, copper--suggest 19th century formality, whimsical wood carvings and asymmetrical lines add a decidedly offbeat flair.

“The color schemes are incredible,” Tammy Coburn said. “You can put the most unlikely combinations together--and they work.”

Under any circumstances, the ornate house would inspire awe, sitting as it does on a rolling hillside and offering sweeping valley views. Knowing that it burned to the ground in 1981 only adds to its aura.

A worker using a torch to peel paint on the third floor forgot to turn off the torch, and the structure soon was enveloped by roaring flames. All that remained were the round front towers and thousands of pieces of tile.

After surveying the devastation, the Newhalls instantly decided to rebuild. Relying on photographs and interviews with people who knew the mansion well, they reconstructed it, right down to the tiny initial “Cs” carved into the wood by Cook.

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Today, a few scorched floor tiles are the only evidence of the blaze.

Tammy Coburn is well-versed in the history of the place, often launching into anecdotes about past owners while giving a tour. Her husband is enthusiastic but less sponge-like in his quest for knowledge, remarking that his wife is the type to “stop and read every sign on the way down a trail in the Grand Canyon. I’d be at the bottom and she’d be halfway there.”

She learned on the Internet, for example, that Cook claimed the peaceful lifestyle in Piru helped cure him of tuberculosis. By walking the grounds, she found that when he tried replicating the Garden of Eden in the backyard, he somehow forgot to plant an apple tree.

Having once lived nearby, she also knew of the Newhalls, whose adventurous spirit and crusading journalism helped shape the Santa Clarita Valley.

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During the Newhalls’ residence, the Piru Mansion acquired the nickname “The Poor Man’s Hearst Castle,” in reference to Scott Newhall’s career and his personalized touches, which are evident throughout the house. He memorialized his love of the ocean with a teak bathtub that sports pressure gauges from a boat, as well as a sea horse logo worked into the copper and brass railing that wraps around the house.

As did their predecessors, the new owners plan to open the house for occasional events and fund-raisers benefiting Piru. Schoolchildren will tour the grounds. Charities will stage benefits.

Amid that presumably constant activity, the Coburns hope to settle in and convert the third floor into a “living suite” with modern amenities.

“That’ll be our little retreat,” Tammy Coburn said, surveying a living room filled with antique furniture and a grand piano from a bygone era. “Besides, I don’t think our big-screen TV will work down here.”