Estate sale starts today at Wichita ‘castle.’ Here’s what visitors will see:
Even Wichitans who don’t typically go to estate sales have been buzzing about this one.
Earlier this week, a Facebook post started circulating promising a sale at the Belmont Castle, 320 N. Belmont, and so far, 2,000 people and counting have marked themselves as “interested.”
Why wouldn’t they be? A castle? In Wichita? That’s not the Campbell Castle?
The “castle” where the sale runs through Saturday is technically more of a Jacobean Revival manor. The 8,000-square-foot College Hill mansion, built in 1922 by Robert Clapp — an aircraft executive and the youngest son of prominent Wichita mayor Robert Clapp — has been owned by well-known Wichita physician and Old Town Architectural Salvage owner Grant Rine and his wife, Janet, for the past 13 years.
Janet loved the five-bedroom, seven-bathroom house, which she saw as a fairy tale castle, and the couple lived there for a decade, Rine said. They poured more money than he wants to count into renovating the house, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2006, and threw many memorable parties in its “great hall,” which boasts a three-story-high, vaulted, wood-beamed ceiling.
But three years ago, Janet injured her neck, and the massive home became too much to manage. The couple bought a one-story house in Eastborough, thinking they’d someday return to their manor. Janet’s doing better now, but the couple is more comfortable in their Eastborough house, Rine said. They’ve decided it’s time to sell the manor.
The Rines had filled the home with opulent furnishings and antiques when they lived in it, and Rine thought he’d leave them in place while the home was being shown. But his broker, Cindy Carnahan of The Carnahan Group-ReeceNichols South Central Kansas, told him that in this case, that wasn’t prudent. Potential buyers needed to be able to imagine their own furnishings in the place.
So Rine, who wants to get the house on the market within a week or two, decided over the weekend that he’d put on an estate sale. Rine is well-known locally for his Old Town Architectural Salvage, which recently left Old Town and moved to 2020 E. Douglas. The business, which is packed with reclaimed antiques, furnishings and building materials, has put on several estate sales in the past.
”I said, ‘Well, I can move it in storage, or I can just put it all up for sale, so this is what we’re doing,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of beautiful antiques ranging over four centuries. There’s an 18th-century chest, high-gothic chairs and cabinets — stuff we put a fortune into, we’re just selling for pennies on the dollar.”
Among the more noteworthy items in the sale: a painting by famous Wichita artist John Noble; two prints by prairie printmaker Birger Sandzen, a massive dining room table worthy of Henry VIII, and an antique hand-cranked barrel monkey organ. The sale doesn’t have lots of household items, like dishes and books, but it does include several pieces of plush modern furniture.
The sale, which will run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. today through Saturday, will allow people to see only the main floor of the house: The upper two floors will be closed off. But there’s still plenty to see on the main level, including that massive great hall, the renovated kitchen, the dining room, the pool house and the massive backyard, which stretches all the way back to Crestway Avenue, the street to the east of Belmont.
Rine said he knows that many of the people who visit the sale will be there mostly to check out the house, and he’s fine with that. A fan of all things old and ornate, he gets it.
“Anybody who wants to look, can,” he said.
Rare Wichita architecture
The red brick and limestone house at 320 N. Belmont is commonly referred to as The Clapp Manor. Its builders, Robert Clapp and his wife, Myra, were said to have modeled the house after Great Chalfield Manor in Wiltshire, England, which they had visited.
The style of the house would have been popular in England 500 years ago, Rine said.
“It’s rare to have them here in Wichita,” he said. “There are a few, but nothing quite like this.”
The Clapps lived in the home until the 1940s, when they moved to Colorado Springs and built a similar home. Over the years, the Belmont house had several notable owners, including Derby Oil Co. founder A.L. Derby and his wife, Ida. who had the house from 1944 to 1965; Garvey Inc. chair Olive Garvey, who lived there in the 1960s; oilman Wayne Horst, who lived there from 1976 until 1986; and luxury car dealer Marc Gorges, who owned it from 1997 until 2001. The Rines bought the house from Cessna executive John Doman in 2013.
In addition to the main floor, the house has a second level featuring a maze of bedrooms and bathrooms; a third story with two more bedrooms, and a basement. It also has a working elevator.
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Those who visit should look for the original Elizabethan mantelpiece in the great hall, which Clapp had shipped to Wichita from a 14th-centery English monastery, as well as the minstrel gallery visible from the great hall, which would allow musicians to set up on the second floor to entertain guests below. There’s also a paned oriole window that looks over the great hall from the second floor. It’s where children could look out onto festivities below.
The Rines added many of their own touches to the house. They modernized the kitchen and bathrooms, adding fixtures fashioned from antiques that Rine had either salvaged or purchased. They also added to the great hall a dramatic Gothic bookcase that had been salvaged from a church in Belgium.
“A lot of the original stuff, we didn’t touch,” Rine said. “But there were some things we added to make it just look more grand.”
The dining room ceiling is covered with plaster, which features molded floral figures. And the foyer, with slate floors, has a medieval looking circular stone staircase as well as a stone water fountain. The fountain still works, Rine said, but it was so noisy that the couple turned it off.
The main floor also has a maid’s quarters, which the Rines used as office space, and a morning room just off the kitchen, where they spent most of their time. The morning room was, in the manor’s early days, home to a large wash house.
Just off the great room is a hallway that leads to a pool house, which opens onto an in-ground swimming pool. The architecture on the back side of the house is more stunning than on the front.
Rine says he’s not sure what kind of person might want to buy the massive house, but he is sure they’ll enjoy it.
“This is so easy to live in,” he said. “For some reason, you don’t feel stuffy. . .The first 10 years we lived here before my wife was injured, we had parties, and we didn't ever feel closed in or overwhelmed by the space.”
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