Banning's Biggest Mansion Revives

Last weekend, the ART theater group performed a play at the Banning White House, very likely the biggest home ever built in Banning.

"Horace McCoy, the son of a Beaumont's first mayor John McCoy, built the house in 1947," according to Banning White House manager Pamela Scott.

Recent Christmas parties and the ART show mark a return to public life for the big house on the hill overlooking town.  For eight years, Scott and Dale Thomas, a medical student who's chairman of the nonprofit that owns the big house, have been doing extensive renovation to the unusually designed building.  After a failed experiment as a bed and breakfast, they've opened the renovated McCoy House as a kind of combination catering hall, meeting center, retreat and performance facility.  In other words, you can rent it.

Horace and Beryl McCoy liked to entertain.  As a result, their house had a 1,500 square foot-ballroom with a koa wood parquet floor and a 2,000 square-foot dance deck over it.  There were six bedrooms, seven bathrooms and a 16-car garage downstairs that Thomas and Scott have turned into a game room and performance area. 

Though designed in the late 1940's, the house's style is "Art Deco Streamline," according to Scott.  The McCoy's liked going on cruises, and many of the most luxurious ocean liners of their era were Art Deco ships (the Queen Mary in Long Beach is a superb example of Art Deco, but the Long Beach airport terminal is a better example of Streamline Moderne, a later phase of Art Deco).

The hand railings of the Banning White House look like ship rails, some of the corners are curved, and the rear of the house has trim in the shape of waves.  One can only imagine the conversations between Dr. and Mrs. McCoy and the Wright & Gentry architects who designed the home.  (Parker Wright and Francis Gentry were influential Long Beach architects who designed many buildings considered important enough for historical preservation designations.)

One of the more bizarre aspects of the house, which is quite spectacular in many regards, was the color scheme or lack thereof.  Dr. McCoy was colorblind.

"He painted the exterior himself, and he'd go to town and ask for a bucket of blue paint," said Scott.  "To him, all blue was the same.  When he was done, there was every shade of blue on the outside of the house."

The irrigation system also was nonconformist in nature;  water was drawn from a creek far below the house and piped into a railroad tank car that had been buried on the property to use as a cistern.

His children referred to the house as "Father's Folly," but McCoy retired there until 1953, when he died.

To cover up McCoy's blue meanies, the building's next owner—"a Korean corporation," according to Scott—stuccoed the exterior, which was completely wrong for the building's architectural style.  The Koreans also took half the property and built the subdivision between the White House and Wilson Street, making a handsome profit.

The Koreans sold to Charles Thomas, a native of India, father of Dale, devout Seventh Day Adventist and pioneer in alternative medicine.  In 1985, Thomas had formed Banning Health Services and the nonprofit that still owns the Banning White House when he retired from a 30-year career as a professor in Loma Linda University's School of Public Health.  A doctor of physical therapy, he used the Banning White House as a center where he taught medical massage, simple remedies and other alternative treatments more than two decades before they began to be accepted into the mainstream of US medicine.

Today the spruced up Banning White House is hosting holiday parties, political fundraisers (McCoy was big on those, too) and an occasional performance.  It can sleep up to 25 guests for a retreat, wedding or similar function, and the kitchens and bathrooms, while visually apropos to the building's age, are highly functional.  The five-ton stone fireplace in the ballroom has been supplanted by a half dozen heating and cooling units around the 10,000 square-foot home.

It's still a work in progress, but one with the best views of any house in Banning.  The next big public event will be an alcohol-free New Years Eve party.  For more information, call Scott at 951-907-5292.