Surreal sanctuary.

• Author: Werner, Louis
• Position: Edward James' Las Pozas

Edward James, an eccentric British millionaire and close friend of artists Rene Magritte, Leonora Carrington, and Salvador Dali, always said that he wanted to live in his own Garden of Eden. So, starting in 1949 and working over a 35-year period--and selling off what was then the world's largest collection of Surrealist art in order to afford its (US)$5 million construction cost--he made himself such a garden in Mexico. It is near the isolated Huasteca village of Xilitla in the state of San Luis Potosi, on an 80-acre jungly mountainside of plunging waterfalls, winding footpaths, arched bridges, and nine pools--thus the name, Las Pozas.

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At the garden's wild heart, James left his own surrealistic touches: 36 cast-concrete gateways, gazebos, and architectural follies with names like "The House with a Roof Like a Whale," "Staircase to Heaven," and "Homage to Max Ernst"--all as far from his 300-room English mansion and dissipated Hollywood life as he could flee.

James loved color. He mixed pigments into wet concrete, overpainting it in bright shades when it had set. He strung colored electric lights through the branches and surrounded himself with flamboyant parrots and peacocks. His friend Carrington, a frequent visitor from her home in Mexico City, painted murals. An avid lover of orchids, James was inspired to build his botanically inspired sculptures--in the shape of bamboo and mushrooms--after a frost killed his cherished flowers, and he vowed to grow new varieties that would never die.

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He also believed a man should never finish building his house, and many of the follies have rusted rebar spiking out of their tops. One of them he called the "House with Three Stories that Might Be Five."

The otherworldly cast-concrete sculptures first required that wooden forms be made, a task assigned to master carpenter Jose Aguilar Hernandez, a simple man from the village whose life was transformed by his brush with Surrealism. "Don Eduardo and I were the only ones who knew what we were doing," he later said. "No one else could even imagine." How indeed could he have explained to his fellow furniture makers in Xilitla his making...