Williams's sensitive reconstructions were praised by Henry Avray Tipping, the writer, architect and garden designer. The architectural writer Michael Hall was also impressed, describing Bodley's drawing room as "Edwardian antiquarian taste at its most refined". The process of reconstruction was less harmonious, Williams and Garner rowed constantly and Garner ultimately resigned. Almost all of Bodley and Garner's work was eradicated in the "brutal" remodelling undertaken by William Randolph Hearst. Williams also assembled a collection of arms and armour which was housed at the castle, and made major improvements to the castle's setting, moving the village which previously stood close to the castle's walls to a new location outside of the gates and constructing three entrance lodges. In 1903, the novelist Violet Paget, writing under her pseudonym Vernon Lee, used the castle as the model for St Salvat's Castle in her Gothic novel "Penelope Brandling: A Tale of the Welsh Coast in the Eighteenth Century". Godfrey Williams, Morgan's son, disliked St Donat's, by tradition on account of its being haunted although this is disputed, and in 1921, having first culled the herd of deer that his father had reintroduced to the park, put the castle up for sale. Its advertisement in "The Times", dated 3 May 1921, described the castle as "a comfortable and liveable old-world home of the first importance". In 1922, it was bought, along with of land, by Richard Pennoyer, an American diplomat married to the Dowager Countess of Shrewsbury. Pennoyer was to own St Donat's for less than three years. William Randolph Hearst inherited a mining and real estate fortune from his mother, and made a fortune of his own through the establishment of the Hearst Corporation, the largest newspaper and magazine company in the world. Part of the revenues were spent on the building of San Simeon, his Spanish-style castle in California, which began construction in 1919. By 1925 he was eager to purchase a genuine castle, and on 13 August he sent a wire to Alice Head, the London-based managing director of his European operations, "Want buy castle in England . St Donat's perhaps satisfactory at proper price. See if you can get right price on St Donat's or any other equally good." Within two months it was Hearst's, or specifically, the property of the National Magazine Company. The price paid for the castle and of surrounding land was $130,000. Hearst employed Sir Charles Allom as his architect and designer.