More than a home

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 34021, 10 December 1975, Page 5

More than a home

(N.Z. Press Assn—Copyright) HILLSBOROUGH, (California). “It is,” says a former New Zealander, Selwyn McCabe, “more than a home.” Indeed it is, United i Press International re- ■ ports. It has 110 rooms and a grand tradition, and Mr McCabe, a retired 50-year-old bachelor heart surgeon,

has bought it for SUS4IO,OOO. The mansion he now owns is Carolands, the chateau of the late Countess Lillian Remillard Dandini, 15 miles south of San Francisco. It was built 61 years ago by the Pullman railroad heiress, Harriet Pullman Carolan Schermerhorn. Mr McCabe, a mansion buff, has a taste for extravagance that would earn the

envy of Hugh Hefner — or Henry VIII. He already owns a 25,000-square-foot Italian-style villa overlooking the ocean at Pacific Palisades, near Los Angeles. He calls that “The Beach House.” Mr McCabe outbid everyone for Carolands at a probate hearing in San Mateo County Superior Court, but had to sleep in a hotel that night; He will not be able to move in until legal details are straightened out. He first saw California at the age of 14, when his father had business interests in the United States.

“I fell in love with San Francisco,” he said. “As soon as I got out of medical school in New Zealand, I headed straight for the airport and came right back to America — working in hospitals in New York and Chicago.” His new mansion is, he says, “a dream, a challenge, an inspiration. Just to walk in it brings out the best in a person. “I don’t underestimate the amount of work it will require to keep it up. But it will be worth it. This chateau is a work of art.” At present, Countess Dandini’s social secretary, Bob Lewallen, is the sole occupant of the 110-room home. But Mr McCabe hopes to move in soon. “Many of my ancestors lived in houses like this,” he said. “George Stephenson (the nineteenth-century British railway inventor) was one, and Thomas Chippendale.”

The surgeon said he was devoting his retirement years to research on artificial hearts, and by-pass and kidney machines. “That’s when you really go to work — when you retire,” he said> How long did he plan to live at Carolands? “Until the earthquake,” he said. “And then I’ll sit on the land.”