Charles A. Baldwin and his wife Ellen Hobart Baldwin built Le Petit Trianon in 1892 as the centerpiece of their wine-producing estate. Baldwin was not content with merely growing grapes; he imported vines from Bordeaux and other French wine regions, installed a massive stone winery, and constructed the underground cellars that would outlast the enterprise itself. The couple entertained lavishly. The mansion's name references the Grand Trianon at Versailles, built for Louis XIV, and its architectural details -- columns, pilasters, wood shutters, and proportioned windows -- draw directly from classical French motifs that were fashionable in American domestic architecture at the end of the nineteenth century.

Le Petit Trianon is constructed using "V" rustic redwood, a building technique in which redwood boards are overlapped in a V-shaped profile. It is the only remaining example of this construction method in the area. The redwood itself connects the building to the forests that once covered much of the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Peninsula's foothills -- the same forests that were logged to build San Francisco and the communities of the Santa Clara Valley. That a French-styled mansion was built from California redwood is its own small irony: Old World aesthetics rendered in New World materials, on land that had been part of Mexican California just decades earlier.

The wine estate did not survive Prohibition and the subsequent transformation of the Santa Clara Valley from agricultural land to suburban development. De Anza College was built around the mansion, which now houses the California History Center -- a fitting second life for a building that is itself a piece of California history. The center offers exhibits, lectures, and workshops focused on state history and the region's development. Its Stocklmeir Library and Archives holds materials on California history and the Santa Clara Valley's evolution, including oral histories, photographs, manuscripts, and student research papers. Materials must be used on site, a requirement that ensures visitors spend time inside a building most would otherwise walk past on their way to class.