Pyne Castle, a three-story Normandy Revival mansion, sits atop the hill at 770 Hillcrest Drive, offering a commanding 180-degree view of downtown and the ocean. Built in the late 1920s with 62 rooms, owner Estel Walter Pyne named it Broad View Villa.
Estel Pyne moved west with his mother, Lucretia, and two brothers, Forrest and Cecil, in the late 1890s. All three brothers were musically gifted. Estel worked as a guitarist on the passenger ship “Yale,” which ran between San Pedro and San Francisco. Cecil was a music teacher. Although Forrest died in 1903, Estel and Cecil, eager to enter the music industry, obtained the agency for the player piano. Cecil held the exclusive agency for Los Angeles County, while Estel had the same for Orange County, with a store in Santa Ana operated by the Pyne Piano Company. Always ambitious, Estel didn’t wait for customers; he loaded a piano onto his wagon and hauled it to interested buyers. How could they resist?
Soon, Estel invested in orange land. He bought acreage in Santa Ana Canyon near Olinda and Richfield territory. Although he was married twice, both short marriages, he lived alone among his orange trees. But the orange land yielded black gold—oil. By the 1920s, Mr. Pyne was earning over $1,000 per day for his oil leases.
Mr. Pyne had the idea that he would build a mansion so that his relatives could come and live with him (though his brothers were dead and had no children). He chose property in Laguna—about 3.5 acres of scrub brush north of the village near Boat Canyon—and construction began. It took seven and a half years. In February 1927, he invited his cousin Mary Foster and her husband Homer to live near the site. Homer was to be the construction foreman, and Mary was to cook for the workers. True to his frugal nature, Mr. Pyne marked out the building’s footprint himself (no surveyor needed), purchased rough lumber after it was used for forming concrete for state highway bridges (no new lumber needed for framing), and hand-selected every piece of special lumber at a set price. He hired carpenters at $3 a day, while the going rate was $5, but when Mr. Pyne took his nap, the workers rested too, with one standing guard to alert them of Mr. Pyne’s awakening…