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Knapp’s Arcady
Knapp set about improving the estate. He hired Russell Ray, a popular
Boston architect of the time, to design an addition to the main house that
included a tower and bridge to the upper garden. The new wing had eight
new bedrooms, each with a bath, as well as new dining rooms, kitchens,
and porches. Part of the old house became a studio with balcony and
pipe organ. Knapp provided housing for his workers by building servants’
quarters and gardeners’ cottages.
Knapp also set about making less practical additions to the estate. In
1916, Francis T. Underhill completed a Roman-style pool house with a
retractable roof. Just outside was an outdoor pool whose waters cascaded
down the center of a long stairway that led to the lower gardens. Knapp
added a music pavilion on another part of the property, complete
with pipe organ for sunset concerts and an underground ballroom
whose mirrors reflected the mountains. He also created a tea patio and
observation platform from a giant redwood trunk. The hollow trunk had a
door hidden in its base that opened to a stairway that climbed up through
the trunk to the platform.
The entire estate was meticulously landscaped. Whereas Underhill had
designed the lower gardens, Carleton Monroe Winslow designed the
terrace and upper gardens. When the Garden Club of America held its
annual meeting in Montecito in April of 1926, Knapp gave a detailed
Knapp with Mrs. C. K. G. Billings at a polo match in Montecito
(Courtesy Santa Barbara Historical Museum)
program of his gardens to each member.
The Garden Club annual report noted, “It would be quite impossible in
anything short of the whole Bulletin to really describe Arcady, where blue
gardens are decked out with such blue flowers as agapanthus, campanula,
veronica, iris, statice, anchusa, the stately echium, lobelia, delphinium and
forget-me-nots.”
There were also yellow gardens and green gardens and rose gardens and
redwood gardens. In fact, there were 19 gardens and Knapp had recorded
each plant in each garden and included photographs by J. Walter Collinge
as well. Half the world seemed represented by his botanical specimens.
Fountain near music pavilion with sentinel eucalyptus trees at Arcady
(Courtesy Santa Barbara Historical Museum)