This 63-room castle in rural Illinois was built as a 'temple of love and art' | CBC Documentaries

It's a sprawling, stunning castle built for two.

Welcome to Havencrest Castle, home to a modern-day fairy tale in Savanna, Illinois.

The 63-room home was designed and built by Alan and Adrianne St. George, a couple who believed that "reality is for those who lack imagination."

Alan and Adrianne met in 1965, when they were both in their early teens. Later, they married even as they were both disowned by their disapproving families. Alone in the world, they created Havencrest as a refuge for themselves, filled with art and beauty, custom costumes, gowns and wigs, and the occasional lavish party.

The new documentary Adrianne & the Castle steps into their world — their hand-built castle and the love story set inside it.

About a year after buying the salmon-coloured house that would become Havencrest, Adrianne told Alan that she hated it.

After a long conversation, Adrianne said she could learn to love their home on one condition: she could decorate it however she wanted.

Alan agreed, and so began the 30-year journey of transforming the house into a 63-room castle: major expansions and construction, and everything brought to life without an architect or designer. Alan was a classically trained painter and sculptor, and the castle construction was funded by his mascot and costume company.

"Adrianne would come up with great ideas, and I'd execute them," Alan says in the film. "All around us were blank canvases that would become the rooms of our home."

"Her creativity was inexhaustible. She could have decorated 10 Havencrests."

This couple built an ornate fairy-tale castle as a memento to their love

For a 20th wedding anniversary, the traditional gift is a piece of fine china.

"[Adrianne] was thinking the 20th anniversary, our wedding anniversary, would be china with a small 'c,' but she wanted to do China with a big 'C,'" Alan told a local PBS station.

And so the Chinese Tea Room was born. It's one of many rooms in the house dedicated to a place or an art period. Alan said that everything in the tea room was sourced from China and that Adrianne arranged an accompanying Chinese garden according to the principles of feng shui.

In the Kali-Ma Room, vintage saris are hung from the ceiling in pastel colours, and all the wood furniture is gilded and adorned with mother-of-pearl. Adrianne used the richly colourful space as her dressing room, Alan told PBS, and kept her jewelry and tiara collection there.

The rococo and baroque periods are popular sources of inspiration throughout Havencrest. The Russian Rococo Library features artwork and mouldings made specifically for the room, and Adrianne's face was used as inspiration for one of Alan's sculptures. In the Beaux Arts Ballroom, several art periods are combined in one place, and one of Alan's many portraits of the couple is a focal point.

The documentary shows Alan painting a mural in the Venus Grotto, another sumptuously appointed room, this time inspired by the German opera Tannhäuser. Adrianne is Venus, the goddess of love, Alan explains, while he is the eponymous hero, trapped by her allure.

In recent years, Alan has opened Havencrest to the public for weekend tours during May and October, breathing new life into his passion project. His website points out that more than 250 light switches have to be turned on to light the castle, which takes staff a full hour.

Alan and Adrianne's "temple of love and art," as he calls it, was once a private world, conjured up by a couple who stayed up all night and slept the days away, and rarely stepped out into their rural town.

Now, caring for the castle is Alan's labour of love. Adrianne died of congestive heart failure in 2006.

"The grief is a sickness, but it's connected to the love," he says in the film. "So I don't want to give it up."

Watch Adrianne & the Castle on CBC Gem and the CBC Docs YouTube channel.

Nina Dragicevic is a freelance writer with bylines in the CBC, Toronto Star, Storeys and The Globe and Mail. She also publishes fiction, with her first two books scheduled for release in 2023 and 2025.

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