Here is the frustrating thing about wanting to see the inside of a historic Minneapolis mansion in December: most of them close the door on you exactly when you most want in. The city has an extraordinary stock of Gilded Age houses, and a surprising number of them are private, booked for weddings, or — in the case of the grandest public one — turned over entirely to a holiday exhibition.
So the honest answer to “can I tour a mansion in Minneapolis at Christmas?” is yes, but the list is short. Here is what is actually open, year-round and at the holidays, and what you’ll see inside.
First, the one that closes: the Turnblad Mansion
The American Swedish Institute’s 1903 Turnblad Mansion on Park Avenue is the mansion most visitors think of first, and rightly — French Renaissance Revival, hand-carved woodwork, eleven Swedish tile stoves (“kakelugnar”) that are worth the ticket on their own. But ASI does not run its mansion tours during the holiday exhibition. Their 75th annual Nordic holiday celebration takes over the house from late November through early January, and the guided tour goes on hiatus. It is a wonderful thing to walk through. It just isn’t a mansion tour.
Which leaves two houses in Minneapolis where you can still book a proper guided tour in December — and, as it happens, they’re the two the trolley runs between.
300 Clifton: the Carpenter Mansion, and the only one you can sleep in
Eugene J. Carpenter made his money in lumber — the Carpenter-Lamb mill — and in 1906 hired Edwin Hewitt to rebuild the 1887 house at 300 Clifton Avenue into what is still widely called the finest Georgian architecture in Minnesota. Hewitt was the architect behind a good share of the city’s best rooms, and he did not hold back here: a carved staircase, plaster ceilings, a drawing room built for a hundred people to stand around in.
Which is exactly what they did. Carpenter and his wife Merrette effectively bankrolled the beginning of arts life in this city — the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (now the Minnesota Orchestra) and the institution that became the Minneapolis Institute of Art both trace organizing meetings and early money to this family and this house. People call it the birthplace of the arts in Minneapolis, and for once the plaque is not exaggerating.
The tour is year-round and it goes where the public rooms are: the entry hall, the drawing room, the dining room, the staircase, the garden. The part that surprises people is what happens after — this is the only mansion in Minneapolis you can tour and then sleep in. The guest rooms are upstairs, there is a four-season hot tub in the garden, and there is a speakeasy in the old cistern called Gertrude’s, which has a video lounge for the haunted-house material.
The Pillsbury Mansion: the house flour built
Ten minutes south, at 100 East 22nd Street, is the Charles S. Pillsbury Mansion — built 1912 to 1914 by Hewitt & Brown for the son of the Pillsbury milling family, in full English Gothic Revival. Where the Carpenter house is light and symmetrical, this one is dark, carved, and a little theatrical: English oak paneling, stone tracery, fireplaces on a scale that stopped being practical about a century ago. Several of the paneled rooms were bought in England and shipped over whole.
It operates now as the Pillsbury Club, and it runs tours year-round alongside a speakeasy-style bar and a private theater. It also has a reputation, which the staff will neither confirm nor particularly deny.
The Christmas version of both tours
From late November the two houses decorate, and the mansion tour turns into something closer to a Christmas-at-the-mansion walk-through — garland on the staircases, trees in the drawing rooms, and the December light doing what December light does through leaded glass at four in the afternoon.
The tidy way to do both in one evening is the Gilded Age Mansion Tour, which runs by vintage trolley past the Carpenter, Pillsbury, Van Dusen, Semple, Gale and Harrington houses with the family stories attached. In December the same trolley also runs the Naughty or Nice holiday light ride — 21+ BYOB from $75, or an all-ages version with a holiday market stop from $30. We wrote up how that ride works in detail if you’re weighing it against the other lights options in town.
What else to see while you’re in mansion territory
If you catch the bug, the Hennepin History Museum is itself a 1919 Christian family mansion in Whittier and is open to walk through. And two of the state’s best house museums are a short drive out: the James J. Hill House in St. Paul and Glensheen in Duluth. Worth noting that the Hill House runs its guided tours January through November, so December takes it off the board too. Neither is in Minneapolis anyway, which is rather the point — in the city, at the holidays, the list really is two.
Planning a visit
Mansion tours at 300 Clifton run year-round; December dates book up first, and the holiday-decorated weekends go fastest. If you’re making a night of it, the Loring Park side of the city has plenty going on in every season, and Oakland’s on 9th has furnished studios downtown by the month if your stay runs longer than a weekend.
Ready to walk through it? Book a tour or a room at 300 Clifton, or call (612) 900-3220. Come for the architecture; stay because the staircase talked you into it.
Keep reading: Where to Stay for FinnFest USA 2026 in Minneapolis (September 17–20).