The Pittock Mansion, a 1914 Portland masterpiece and one of the West’s great houses, would soon have a date with the wrecking ball. Built for pioneer businessman Henry Pittock and his wife, Georgiana, by skilled Oregon craftsmen using mainly Northwest materials like Tenino sandstone from Washington, it was roughed up during a ferocious storm in 1962 and had been on the market since the last Pittock descendant moved out in 1958. More to the point, it stood in the way of developers itching to get their hands on its stunning site, a 46-acre wooded preserve nearly 1,000 feet above the city’s downtown, with lofty views of the Willamette and Columbia rivers and five snowcapped peaks—Hood, Jefferson, Adams, St. Helens, and Rainier.

In the end, though, beauty triumphed after a small army of outraged citizens quickly raised $67,500 toward preservation. “We collected money from bake sales, teas, piggy banks, whatever,” recalls Patti Laumand, now a Pittock docent. “We were all young back then, very excited about Portland’s future and worried that its history was being thrown out.” The decisive show of support persuaded the city to buy the entire estate for $225,000, spend 15 months restoring the house, and open it to the public in 1965.

Since then, the 22-room French Renaissance château has been one of Portland’s most elegant community landmarks. About 60,000 visitors tour the house each year, many of them between late November and New Year’s Eve, when holiday decorations are up. The parklike garden, with its rhododendrons and flowering cherries, draws picnickers and couples posing for wedding photos. Pittock cut the paths through the surrounding woods himself. They connect with miles of trails in adjacent Forest Park and are popular with hikers and joggers.

On either self-guided or docent-led tours of the house, you’ll ascend a magnificent, curved marble staircase and walk through rooms fully decorated with the Pittocks’ own furnishings or pieces from the same period. The oval drawing room, outfitted with crystal chandeliers and gilt-finished, upholstered Louis XVI chairs, looks as though Marie Antoinette might pop in for a visit, and the mahogany wainscoting, ceiling beams, and built-in buffet lend the craftsman-style dining room a surprisingly cozy feel.

The most striking room, the tiny, circular Turkish smoking room, boasts an ornate, domed ceiling embossed with a Middle Eastern design and iridescent walls glazed with successive layers of blue, green, gold, and silver pigments. The house is also ?lled with early-20th-century innovations that fascinated Henry, among them an intercom system, individual room thermostats, a walk-in freezer, and a central vacuuming system.

You’ll also learn about Henry and Georgiana—he a short, indomitable English immigrant who owned The Oregonian newspaper, she a devoted advocate for the poor and the originator of an annual flower-growing competition that developed into the famed Portland Rose Festival. By the time the couple moved into their mansion late in their lives, they had seen Portland grow from a raw settlement to a bustling city. That the Pittock Mansion today remains one of Portland’s architectural glories would have pleased them, but not more than the fact that although progress is prized in their beloved city, there’s still plenty of room for beauty.