After years of legal battles, it looks like the Woodside Town Council agreed to allow Steve to demolish his home on Mountain House Road in Woodside.
The 1926 Spaish Revival estate of the top the hill was built by a copper magnate and now owned by Steve Jobs, is one step closer to demolition. After years of legal battles, the Woodside Town Council last week agreed that the 14 bedroom, 17,000 square foot home could be torn down. A demolition permit could be issued as soon as next month.
For more than a decade empty, the house that once hosted the likes of Shirley Temple, Charles Lindbergh and Richard Nixon is destroying itself.
Bougainvillea that once graced the front facade with bright pink flowers has grown thick and monstrous, wrapping its arms around the terrace. Tendrils creep up the balcony, grasp a vulnerable edge, and pry off chunks of white stucco that crash to the ground and lay still.
Ceilings have collapsed under puddles of rain water. Broken windows have lured in the mold. An owl took roost in the master bedroom. And lizards scamper everywhere.
“We call this demolition by neglect,” said Brian Turner, law fellow at the San Francisco office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, who has been fighting to save the house.
Jobs bought the property off Mountain Home Road in 1984, the year he introduced the Apple Macintosh to the world. He lived there for nearly a decade before renting it out and moving to Palo Alto. Time magazine once photographed him sitting on the expansive, sloping lawn with the gleaming white fortress behind him.
Even Daniel Jackling, a copper baron, tore down a clapboard cottage to build the Woodside estate for his family. He hired renowned architect George Washington Smith, famous for his Spanish Colonial Revival homes in Santa Barbara and Montecito. Jackling’s wife, a San Francisco socialite, rode horses from the stables across what was then a 100-plus acre property. His niece played the organ — the biggest privately owned pipe organ in the country — in an ornate room built especially for it. Prominent musicians would make pilgrimages to play upon it. Charles Lindbergh was a guest.
Source Mercury News
For additional photos and history of the home go to The Jackling House Showdown by Jonathan Haeber