By Alhambra Resident Fame Rybicki

The Dupuy Chateau has received a good deal of prominence lately but few people in Alhambra know about it. In the last few weeks, so many people have asked me where it is because the many deodar trees have now hidden it from plain sight.

Mr. and Mrs. Sylvester's daughter, Marie, and I became good friends when our daughters were attending Ramona Convent. One day, Marie said to me, "I used to look down at your house and wished that I could live there." I was shocked because as I told her, "I used to look up at your house and wish that I could have lived there."

My parents, Giles Edward and Evelyn Ratkowski, bought the Oriental house at the corner of Fremont Avenue and Valley Boulevard in 1926, a few months before Mr. Dupuy completed the construction of his chateau.

During the building of the chateau, Mr. Dupuy kept a goat on the property, and it took a strange attachment to Mr. Dupuy's cement mixer. Wherever the mixer was moved, the goat moved along with it. When my father asked Mr. Dupuy if he could borrow his mixer, Mr. Dupuy agreed but warned my father that the goat would probably go along with it. Sure enough, as my father pulled the mixer down the hill, the goat followed and stayed with the mixer. A few days later, when the mixer was towed back up the hill, the goat followed it home.

Sylvester and Anna Dupuy came to Southern California from the Pyrenees area of France in the 1870s, and joined a colony of French immigrant sheepherders. Their 80,000 sheep ranch covered most of South Alhambra and some of Monterey Park. The Dupuy's first house stood at the base of the hill, where California State University, Los Angeles is now located. In 1900, the family that had included three sons and a daughter, moved to a two-story Victorian house on Edith Avenue, Alhambra.

Mr. Dupuy, however, dreamed of building a French chateau similiar to those in the Pyrenees mountains. In 1924, he hired architect John Walter Stuart to design a 15-room chateau (with garages which weren't in vogue yet at that time) on three acres on Alta Vista Avenue, on the hill south of Valley Boulevard and west of Fremont. The walls were reinforced concrete, the roof tiles came from Holland, and imported Italian marble covered the main floor and all the bathrooms. He purchased the chateau's maple wood flooring from the Alhambra School District after the second Alhambra High School on Main and Third Street, had already been demolished in 1923. The "castle" as it became known, was finished in March 1926, at a cost of $40,000. Surrounding the chateau, he planted a grove of Himalayan deodar trees, which now hide the castle.

Mr. Dupuy died in 1936 and Mr. Dupuy sold the castle in 1947 to race car enthusiast-turned-realtor, E. T. Bondurant, who converted it into eight apartments. Then, R. W. Wilson owned the mansion for about 20 years. In 1985, the new owner, Chinese industrialist Todd Hsu, restored the castle to a single family dwelling filled with Oriental ebony, teakwood, Chinese silks and satins. He exhibited the transformed French chateau at an Open House for the community.

For a time, the castle was occupied by the Lotus Engineering firm, who also rented Ratkowski's Oriental House at Fremont and Valley Blvd. to house engineering students from China, who attended California State University and USC. Following that, the chateau became the property of a Hong Kong bank. It stood empty for many years, before it was purchased by Phil Spector.