A Collaborative Arts Residency Comes of Age at Montalvo Arts Center

A Collaborative Arts Residency Comes of Age at Montalvo Arts Center
Ten remarkable, avant-garde buildings to be used by visiting artists have quietly sprouted over the last few years on a scenic hilly estate in Saratoga that once belonged to Sen. James Phelan. The former orchard site, officially called the Lucas Artists Programs at Montalvo, is now loosely dubbed an "orchard of artists." It promises rare fruit.

Artists, writers, musicians and other guests had routinely traipsed through Villa Montalvo, Phelan's Mediterranean-styl e mansion, and the 175 acres of gardens and orchards surrounding it long before the estate was officially bequeathed in 1930 to California for the encouragement of the arts and architecture.

In 1939, it became an arts center and outdoor theater that supported artist residencies (in three cramped cottages and rooms inside the villa that proved inconvenient over time), a stage, and galleries for literary and visual arts.

With the new crop of buildings designed by some of the best-known American architects along with artists and writers, Montalvo Arts Center hoped to revamp the oldest arts residency in the West into the best.

The ten live-work environments and a meeting hall, which began to take shape four years ago, were funded by private donors. The results help to make new architecture an integral part of arts explorations at Montalvo.