Short answer: yes. The two houses you walk into on the Gilded Age Mansion Tour, the brick Georgian at 300 Clifton and the gray limestone Gothic pile we call home at 100 East 22nd Street, look as though they belong to different centuries. They were shaped six years apart by the same man, Edwin Hawley Hewitt, and built by the same contractor. That is the kind of secret a mansion tour is for.

Who was Edwin Hewitt?

Edwin Hawley Hewitt was born in Red Wing in 1874, studied at the University of Minnesota and MIT, and then did what ambitious American architects did at the turn of the century: he went to Paris and enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts. He came home to Minneapolis in October 1904 and was offered a commission almost immediately. In 1910 he took on engineer Edwin H. Brown as a partner, and Hewitt & Brown went on to design St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral on Loring Park and a long list of buildings now on the National Register. Two of his houses sit at the heart of our tour.

1906: the Carpenter Mansion, rebuilt in ten months

When Eugene and Merrette Carpenter bought 300 Clifton in November 1905, it was a Queen Anne house with a wrap-around porch and a turret. They handed the young, Paris-trained Hewitt an almost impossible brief: turn it into a Georgian. According to the City of Minneapolis landmark record, he stripped the porch, replaced the many-gabled roof with a hipped roof and dormers, and gave the house a perfectly symmetrical face with a Doric portico at the door and an Ionic porch on the east side. The family moved in by September 1906. John S. Bradstreet, the city’s great designer, did the interiors.

The house earned its reputation as the birthplace of the arts in Minneapolis because of what happened next. From 1911 to 1922 Eugene Carpenter chaired the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts, the organization that became the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Hewitt himself was deeply involved in the campaign that got the museum built. Architect and client had become collaborators in something larger than a house. Today 300 Clifton is a bed and breakfast, and the only mansion in Minneapolis you can tour and then sleep in, which is a story we told in Can You Tour a Minneapolis Mansion and Then Sleep in One?

1912–1914: the mansion flour built

English Gothic in gray Bedford limestone

Six years later Charles S. Pillsbury, son of the founder of the Pillsbury Company, hired Hewitt & Brown for a house on East 22nd Street. This time there was no old shell to work around, and Hewitt chose a completely different language: English Gothic Revival, with hooded windows, ornate chimneys, steep roofs and carved stonework in gray Bedford limestone. The city’s landmark file lists the contractor as the H.N. Leighton Company, the same firm that had rebuilt 300 Clifton. Inside, the rooms were designed by Charles Duveen of London, which is why the panelling here still feels like an English country house. The house was designated a Minneapolis landmark in 1975.

The circle closes

Here is the detail we like best. After the Pillsburys, the house became a theological seminary, and in 1969 it was bought and preserved by the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts, the very organization Eugene Carpenter had chaired. The architect connected the two houses on paper; the art society connected them in fact. Both are now Minneapolis landmarks, and both are open to you on the same afternoon.

What the year-round mansion tour actually is

The Gilded Age Mansion Tour boards a vintage trolley here at the Pillsbury Club and rolls through the old mansion district, past the Washburn, Peavey, Van Dusen and Turnblad houses, with the stories of the lumber, flour and grain fortunes that built them. Most mansions you admire from the sidewalk; at 300 Clifton and the Pillsbury Mansion you step inside. It runs all year, which matters more than you might think. If you are new to the term, start with what “Gilded Age” means and why Minneapolis has a mansion tour at all.

Christmas at the mansion

Every December the American Swedish Institute fills the Turnblad Mansion with its holiday exhibition and, as ASI’s own tours page notes, public mansion tours are not available while it runs. That leaves the Gilded Age Mansion Tour as the public mansion tour in Minneapolis you can still book through the holidays, with both houses dressed for the season. We wrote about that in Can You Tour a Minneapolis Mansion at Christmas?, and Minneapolis Trolley Tours keeps a running guide to which mansion tours run year-round and which only appear in December. December evenings here also belong to the Holiday Light Ride, which boards from the same front steps.

Come see Hewitt’s two houses for yourself. Book the Gilded Age Mansion Tour, then reserve a table at the Pillsbury Club before or after, and if you would like to sleep under the roof Hewitt raised in 1906, 300 Clifton is waiting a mile up the hill.

Keep reading: Why does the Pillsbury Mansion’s 1636 stained glass roundel carry two different dates?

Keep reading: How to Book Your Company’s Holiday Party at the Pillsbury Club