America’s Greatest Castles and Mansions

Large Private Residences from the Mercantile and Modern Ages

America is a land of opportunity — according to some fairly enthusiastic individuals.

This means the freedom to build environmentally destructive houses that would make Buckingham Palace look like a shack in comparison.

In reality, this has seldom been the case, and while the average private homes of North Americans continues to remain larger than their European counterparts, there are far fewer examples of a home that could truly match the size and luxury of royalty.

Few, but not non-existent.

Fortunately for my readers I have found a small list of promising candidates that may make King Charles III a little envious as he sits around in Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, wishing that England itself was only a little bigger so that he could make a castle that would top those on this list.

BOLDT CASTLE

There once lived a man from New York named George Boldt who wanted to impress his wife so badly for Valentines Day that he built her a 60,000-square-foot castle on a private island situated between the United States and Canada.

With only a few weeks before the multi-year project was to be completed, Louise Kehrer died on January 7, 1904 at the age of forty-two.

His time, effort, and money wasted in addition to losing his spouse, Boldt refused to set foot on the island ever again, and ultimately the castle was never to be inhabited — being left to rust for decades until it eventually became a tourist attraction for American and Canadian tourists travelling by seaway through the Thousand Islands.

Aerial view

Main entrance room

Recreational site which included an unfinished bowling lane

First floor staircase

Billiard room

Parlour room

Kitchen room

VANDERBILT

Biltmore Estate was built by the Vanderbilt Family in 1895 in Asheville, North Carolina, and at just shy of 179,000 square feet, is regarded as the largest private residence in American history.

By 1930 the family of three who had lived there along with their staff could no longer afford to keep it due to the effects of the Great Depression, and so it was agreed through negotiations with the city to turn it into a tourist attraction to boost revenue in return for keeping a share of the property.

Since 1965, Vanderbilt Estate has officially served as a public museum attraction.

Aerial view

Botanical garden room

Reception room

Indoor swimming pool

Living room

Kitchen

Master bedroom

HEARST CASTLE

Randolph Hearst was a media mogul of his days, and as such, he was known to develop a whole bunch of sensational stories with a varying amount of truths and falsehoods ranging from claims of Bruce Ismay abandoning the women and children to their fates on the Titanic all the way to being the first significant publishing tycoon to report on the Holodomor in Ukraine.

According to legend, one could not refuse an invitation to his residence if they wanted to stay on his good side, but once they were there, they were free to do whatever they wanted, as long as everybody, including Charlie Chaplin, was present for dinner every evening.

Following his permanent departure from the residence in 1947, the castle became a tourist attraction and a source of revenue for the people of San Simeon eager to show off one of the largest homes of the Gilded Age to appear on the West Coast.

Aerial view

Approaching the entrance

Outdoor swimming pool

Indoor swimming pool

Reception room

Reading room

Kitchen

Dining room

Bedroom

WHITEMARSH HALL

Just imagine the White House, only twice as large, and you would likely be thinking of the 100,000 square foot Whitemarsh Hall that was built in Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania by banker executive Edward Stotesbury in 1921 under the design of Horace Trumbauer.

Unfortunately, the “Versailles of America” would not have as much of a lifespan as the other great architectural homes listed here, and in 1980 it was officially condemned due to disrepair and demolished — leaving only the porticos that printed its layout standing for future generations to ponder over.

Aerial view

Second floor hallway

Colourised depiction of the bottom first floor staircase near main entrance

Fireplace room

Reception room with what may or may not be a ghostly-looking woman staring at my screen

Colourised depiction of the front entrance

Whitemarsh Hall shortly before her destruction in 1980

Before and now

Lynnewood Hall — the second largest surviving residence of the Gilded Age after Biltmore Castle, and also a fellow neoclassical house of similar grandeur to Whitemarsh Hall, and also located in Pennsylvania and designed by Trumbauer

BILL GATES HOUSE

The Microsoft founder is among the richest human beings in modern history, and so in order to ensure his social status, has gone on to build himself the 66,000 square-foot Xanadu 2.0, which features large-scale indoor swimming pools, libraries, study rooms, industrial kitchens and dining rooms, movie theatres, and also special pins that can adjust room temperatures and music settings to the convenience of the owner without needing to do anything manually.

Library room

Theatre room

Living room

Family room

BONUS — “THE ONE”

This fairly recently built house was featured on YouTube as particularly controversial, and not so much due to its 120,000 square-foot size located just outside of Los Angeles, but because of its design, and the fact that it was created by a home builder who created his own house expecting the small market of uber billionaires to be ready to pay a whopping $500 million rather than allowing them to create their own customised over-the-top mansion.

Needless to say, the residence ultimately sold for barely a quarter of the asking price at $126 million — a decade of investments not paying off.

The city itself was so disgusted by the scale of the project that a new law was imposed, prohibiting future homes in the area from even coming close to matching its size and waste of resources.

Nonetheless, some of the ideas were admittedly a little intriguing as an online viewer, featuring everything from fully anatomical skeleton giraffes to bar rooms featuring toilet rooms that allow women to spy on the men through cameras, and inviting a whole bunch of potential future lawsuits, so I will upload a two-part feature tour of the house for anybody who cares to watch it:

First floor interior

Library room

Outdoor living room

Outdoor family room with private kitchen

Outdoor family living room with full-sized flat screen television and fully equipped pool deck

Second storey grass yard with palm tree located adjacent to the outdoor family room and living room and in front of the fully equipped pool deck

Fully equipped pool deck located underneath private pool leading into master bedroom

Aerial view

Sky deck with mini putt course

Indoor parking lot

Indoor swimming pool

Lounge room featuring two billiard tables

Four-lane bowling room

Candy room — and no, I am not joking

Theatre room

Size of the theatre screen compared to a YouTuber

THE END…

“The One” Tour — Part One

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“The One” Tour — Part Two

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