Bellosguardo

The Bellosguardo International Piano Competition was created to celebrate extraordinary young artists and to connect them with a place that inspires creativity and reflection. Set high above the Pacific, the Bellosguardo Estate provides an intimate setting for the Competition’s Quarterfinal and Semifinal Rounds, where history and artistry meet in service of the next generation of pianists. Bellosguardo is Italian for “beautiful view.”​

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A History of the Estate

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William Andrews Clark purchased Bellosguardo from the Graham family in 1923. Born in Pennsylvania in 1839 to modest means, Clark built a fortune in Montana copper mining and became, by the early twentieth century, one of the wealthiest men in the country. He and his wife, Anna, used the estate as a summer home.

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Anna, French Canadian by birth, met the senator as a young woman dressed as Lady Liberty in a Fourth of July parade and later became his ward. He supported her musical education, and the two married in France in 1901. They had two daughters, Andrée, who died young, and Huguette.

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Clark’s death in 1925, followed that year by the Santa Barbara earthquake, prompted a rethinking of the property. Where the Grahams had built in an Italian style, Anna moved the house toward the French idiom she and her husband had known abroad.​ Construction ran from 1933 to 1936, through the depths of the Depression. Anna gave the project to some of the era’s finest craftsmen and, in doing so, provided steady work to unemployed laborers at a time when little was available.

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Anna’s philanthropy extended into music. In 1946 she founded and funded the Paganini Quartet, a string ensemble that performed on Paganini’s own Stradivarius instruments until her death in 1963.

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Huguette inherited the estate and, after her mother’s death, withdrew from public life. She kept Bellosguardo exactly as Anna had left it, though she never returned to see it. It remained, in her words, her mother’s house, filled with her mother’s things — a house that made her sad to think of. For more than fifty years, no visitors came.

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Huguette died in 2011, leaving instructions that the estate be used to foster and promote the arts. That wish became the Bellosguardo Foundation.

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Today the estate opens weekly for tours of the house, preserved in its original condition, and of the gardens, now under active restoration. The music room hosts performances, and the grounds host cultural events throughout the year.