There is something faintly unsatisfying about a historic house tour. You spend an hour in rooms built for lingering — deep window seats, fireplaces sized for a family, a staircase designed to be walked down slowly — and then a guide thanks you and you go stand in a parking lot. The house keeps going without you.

Minneapolis is unusual in that it offers a way around this. You can tour a Gilded Age mansion here, and then, in one specific case, you can go upstairs and book a room in it.

The two houses you actually get inside

Most of the great Minneapolis mansions are private, or offices, or event venues that open for weddings and nothing else. The year-round Gilded Age Mansion Tour rolls past a long list of them — the Van Dusen, the Semple, the McKnight, the Peavey — but there are two you go inside.

The first is this one: the Charles S. Pillsbury Mansion at 100 East 22nd Street, completed in 1913, English Gothic Revival, built for the son of a flour-milling founder. It is the mansion flour built, and it does not pretend otherwise — carved oak, stone, and a library that looks like it was designed to intimidate a business rival, because it more or less was.

The second is the Eugene J. Carpenter Mansion at 300 Clifton Avenue, and it is the opposite house in almost every way — light, symmetrical, Georgian, all painted ceilings and pale plasterwork where this one is oak and shadow.

The strange part is that both houses came off the same drafting table. Edwin Hewitt designed the Pillsbury Mansion with his partner Edwin Brown, and Hewitt also carried out the remodelling that turned 300 Clifton into what you see now. If you want a short course in how much range one Minneapolis architect had, tour them in the same afternoon. We compared the two in more detail in our guide to which Gilded Age mansions you can actually tour inside.

The one you can sleep in

300 Clifton is a working bed and breakfast. That is the whole trick: it is the only mansion in Minneapolis you can tour and then book a room inside. You see the drawing room on the tour, and later that night you walk back through it on your way up to bed, which is a very different relationship with a building than the one you get from a velvet rope.

Why they call it the birthplace of the arts

The phrase gets used a lot, and it is not marketing. Eugene J. Carpenter chaired the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts from 1911 to 1922 — the organisation that became the Minneapolis Institute of Art. A great deal of the early work of building an art museum for this city happened in the rooms you walk through.

The house itself is older than the Carpenters. It went up in 1877 for the Douglas family in a Queen Anne style; Eugene and Merrette Carpenter bought it in 1905 and had Hewitt strip the roof and rebuild the walls to make it Georgian. Their family kept it until 1948. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.

Touring a mansion in December

This is the part people get caught out by. December feels like the obvious month to see a great house — and it is — but it is also the month when historic house tours in this city thin out.

The best-known example: the American Swedish Institute runs guided tours of the Turnblad Mansion most open days for much of the year, but those regular public tours pause during its annual holiday exhibition, which takes over the house from November into January. A limited run of special ticketed glögg tours goes on sale instead, and they sell out.

Our tours do not pause. Both houses stay open through the holidays, decorated, which is the version of these rooms they were designed for — low light, fires lit, a great deal of greenery on a great deal of oak. We wrote about that at length in can you tour a Minneapolis mansion at Christmas, and about how the houses shift across the year in the best time of year to tour a Minneapolis mansion.

How to build the day

Start here at the Pillsbury Club — the mansion tour, then the dining room or the bar, which is where most people end up staying longer than planned. Add the trolley if you want the wider mansion district: the Gilded Age Mansion Tour departs from this building, and in December the Holiday Light Ride does too.

Then sleep somewhere that matches the day. 300 Clifton if you want the mansion itself; Oakland’s on 9th if you are in town longer and want a downtown base with a kitchen. If you are filling out the rest of the evening, Meet Minneapolis keeps a running list of what else is on in the city over the holidays.

Come see it

Mansion tours run year-round at the Pillsbury Club, and December dates go first. Plan your visit, or book the Gilded Age Mansion Tour and see both houses in one afternoon.

Keep reading: What Was a Flower Room? Reading the Original First-Floor Plan of the Pillsbury Mansion

Keep reading: Where Should You Take Out-of-Town Guests in Minneapolis?