Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005

Home is your castle

Some see abode as gateway to happily ever after

By LISA GUTIERREZ
Knight Ridder Newspapers

At least once a month, people wander into the offices of the Black Archives of Mid-America in Kansas City, Mo., asking about the castle next door.

People who pass by the old stone fortress, boarded up and floating on a field of weeds at the corner of 20th and Vine streets, seem puzzled by the anachronism, a touch of Camelot in urban Kansas City, Mo. The Discovery Channel, researching urban castles across the country, even asked around town about it recently.

“I have a lot of people ask if it’s for sale,” says Bill Livingston, who works at the archives. (Alas, it’s not. A community development corporation owns the building.)

Kansas City can boast of several “castles” — if you don’t take the word too architecturally or too literally. Two are older private homes on the city’s northeast end. Another is an 11-year-old home in the Northland that the owner actually calls Camelot Castle.

In this day and age of split-levels and front-to-backs, homes with castlelike qualities seem to be enjoying a mini-renaissance, in a manor of speaking. (Imagine entire subdivisions — Guinevere Grove, King Henry VIII Estates.)

Wouldn’t King Arthur be jealous of these modern-day castles with their workout rooms, sewing rooms, saunas and cable TV?

Kansas City trial lawyer Lantz Welch’s home is his castle. He moved into his three-bedroom, 18,000-square-foot palace in 1994. Gracious and spacious enough for entertaining — he and his wife, Laura, created the Lantz Welch Charitable Foundation — it’s an appropriate abode for a man who fancies himself Sir Lancelot, a man who named his Web site www.lantzlot.com.

“You’ll never see a stone house in at least Kansas and Missouri that looks like this one,” says Welch of the lakeside home with its turrets and arches and massive front door.

The builder couldn’t find a door big enough for the three-bedroom house with a pool room and copper-roofed greenhouse, so Welch bought the entrance to his alma mater, the old Central High School, a door “that they used to throw me out of quite frequently,” he jokes.

Now it’s his front door, fit for a king, with a huge wooden deadbolt on the inside, “just like you’d find on a castle,” he says.

It surely looks like a castle, but it hasn’t made the “list” yet. Retired computer repairman Jim Dupont is the noble keeper of www.dupontcastle.com , one of the most comprehensive Internet lists of castles across the United States.

He started building his own castle in 1999 in West Virginia and hopes to move in within the next few months. Just call him King James.

The idea began as a whim, cooked up by a group of Renaissance-loving friends who thought it would be fun to build one big building — a castle! — for all to live in together.

After everyone else moved into split-levels, Dupont decided to actually do it. He and his soon-to-be wife expect to spend at least $150,000 on the 5,000-square-foot keep alone. (The “keep” is the main part of a castle, usually in the center, the strongest area where the lord of the manor lives.)

The outside walls of Dupont’s castle are split-face concrete blocks left rough and jagged to approximate stone. It will have traditional wallboard walls inside, but they’re trying to figure out how to paint them to look like stone.

And, yes, there will probably be a suit of armor standing around somewhere and a moat but no water.

“Keep in mind there are at least a dozen under construction in the United States,” says Dupont, who lives for now in Alexandria, Va., and is not related to those DuPonts.

“And a lot of these people are doing it themselves. It’s not like I’m the only goofball out there. I’m one of several. There are a lot more castles around than you thought there were. Everyone’s heard about Hearst and Biltmore, but they don’t realize they’re all over the place.”

Dupont’s list details more than 300 castles in this country, from Alabama to Wisconsin. They are private homes, like one built by a member of the country band Alabama. They are old public works buildings and college gymnasiums and new family theme parks and even gift shops, like Castle San Miguel in Alabama.

The “castle” at 20th and Vine made the list. Known simply as “The Castle,” it was built from 1845 to 1897. Architecturally it is considered a Romanesque Revival structure, recognized by its rounded arches and medieval demeanor. It was a popular castlelike style for American churches of the day, but this building was built as a prison — the inmates both quarried the stone and helped build it.

Now it is vacant. No floors, no roof. Just trees growing up through it.

Most of the older castles in the United States were “built anywhere from 1850 to 1950, around the time when there was a lot of money out there,” says Dupont, who traveled the country visiting castles before he built his. “Most were by rich people who had enough money to say, ‘Here’s your millions of dollars; get the workmen in there.’ A couple of years later they had a castle.”