Scotty’s Castle

According to one of the guides on the tours we took through the castle, Scotty was a fraud. He didn’t have a gold mine, he didn’t design the castle, he didn’t own the castle, and he didn’t even live there. But he was a very entertaining man with all of his tall tales. The whole place was inspirational to Karla and me since the materials are essentially what we want to use in our own house.

Looking down into the courtyard inspires a ton of ideas. Notice the stairway leading downward. The heavy wooden doors are gorgeous, as is all the quarry tile work and glazed ceramics used everywhere in the design. Ironwork is everywhere; the railings, the hardware on the doors and decorative screens were all made of iron.

The seeming randomness of the roof tile spacing is achieved by using different lengths at the top line. Laying roof tiles starts with the bottom course, so in order to keep the exposure (amount of tile showing) constant, you have to do some fiddling at the bottom to begin.

We also noticed that the builders used similar tiles for both cap (top tile) and pan (the tile used underneath). That made us happy because we have 8,000 caps, no pans. We will simply drill holes at the opposite ends of the tiles to make them pans.