It is a reasonable thing to want. The city is at its most beautiful in December, the houses on Park Avenue are lit, and a great old mansion is never more itself than when it is decorated. So: can you actually get inside one?

Yes — but your options narrow at exactly the moment you want them most, and it pays to know that before you plan the evening.

The catch nobody mentions

Minneapolis has fewer touring mansions than its history deserves, and the holidays thin the field further. The American Swedish Institute’s Turnblad Mansion — the city’s best-known historic house tour — pauses its regular guided mansion tours during its annual holiday exhibition, which runs from November into January. They programme lovely seasonal alternatives in its place, but the standard tour is not among them.

Which is how a fair number of visitors end up here instead.

What the Pillsbury Club actually is

The Club occupies the Charles S. Pillsbury Mansion, finished in 1916 at 100 East 22nd Street and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. It is not a mansion built to look Elizabethan. In several rooms it genuinely is one — whole panelled interiors, a carved staircase and a fireplace that survived the Great Fire of London, bought out of English estates and reassembled on the prairie.

Today it is a private club: reservations are required in advance, and everything below runs on that basis. Start at Plan Your Visit for hours and policies.

Three ways inside in December

The Gilded Age Mansion Tour. A trolley tour that takes in the great Minneapolis mansions from the outside — and gets you inside as well. It departs from our front door. Dates are published on the tour calendar; check it before you fix a date, because December fills early. Details are on our experiences and tours page and on the tour page itself.

The Holiday Light Ride. Every Holiday Light Ride begins inside this building, not in a parking lot outside a bar. There is a holiday market in the mansion with handmade work from more than fifty Minnesota artists, cocktails, and dinner if you want it — then a heated vintage trolley out into the lights. It is the easiest way to see the house dressed for the season, and it comes in a family version and a 21+ version.

Dinner and a drink. The simplest option is to book a table. Our dining room and the bar are inside the same rooms the tour walks through, and nobody hurries you along. See the club rooms if you want somewhere particular.

What you are actually looking at

Bring someone who likes detail and they will be occupied for an hour. The oak was split rather than sawn, which is why there are no saw marks anywhere in it. The staircase newel posts carry char from a fire in Herefordshire. Ancient cathedral glass glows in the first- and second-floor windows — and some panels are missing, quietly removed by seminarians in the mid-century who thought them too worldly.

We keep the long version in the History Journal, and the shorter house tour in The Splendors. Neither is required reading. Both make the visit better.

If you are making a night of it

Parking is free across the street. If you are coming from further out, Metro Transit will get you close, and the Washburn-Fair Oaks Park across the road is worth a walk in the snow before you come in.

Staying over? 300 Clifton is a mansion bed and breakfast a few minutes away in Loring Park, and Oakland’s on 9th has furnished studios downtown if you want a kitchen and more than one night.

So: yes, you can tour a Minneapolis mansion at Christmas. You just have to book it. Make a reservation and come see the house with the fire in it.