D avid Howard Murdock (1923-2025) was a self-taught and self-made businessman, born in Kansas City and raised in Ohio, settling in Phoenix and then Los Angeles as an adult and becoming a billionaire investor, financier and one-time owner and CEO of Dole Food Company. This allowed him to develop and pursue interests in gardening and horticulture, Chinese and Chinese Export Art and 18th-century English Furniture. In 1980 he acquired the Casa Encantada, a 1930s neoclassical mansion in Bel Air, Los Angeles with interiors and furniture created by the British architect and designer T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings and owned by the hotel magnate Conrad Hilton (1887-1979), and which twice established a record as the most expensive house sold in the United States. Murdock renamed the property Bellagio House and replaced the Robsjohn-Gibbings furniture with French and English antiques as part of a refurbishment of the interiors, published in Architectural Digest in February 1987.

Casa Encantada was sold in 2000, by which time Murdock had installed his collection in a neo-Georgian mansion built at Ventura Farms, a historic horse-breeding ranch near Thousand Oaks northwest of Los Angeles acquired in 1987. Murdock redesigned the estate’s parkland with Chinese pavilions commissioned and constructed in China and an extraordinary esplanade of 330 ninety-ton granite boulders from the River Kwai in Thailand, excavated and shipped to California on a purpose-built vessel in 1996. Murdock’s lifelong passion for Georgian Furniture led him to acquire the venerable antiques dealer Stair & Company in 1985. Founded by Arthur Stair in London in 1911, with a New York gallery opening in 1914 that traded in East 57th Street for over seventy years, Stair & Company continued under Murdock’s ownership in Mount Street in London until 2004.