What Was Upstairs in the Pillsbury Mansion? Reading the Original Second-Floor Plan
Visitors to the Pillsbury Club spend most of their time on the ground floor — the main hall, the library, the oak-panelled rooms that Charles Stinson Pillsbury imported wholesale from England. The floor above is the private one, and it is the floor almost nobody thinks to ask about. Fortunately, the architects left us an answer.
Among the University of Minnesota’s scans of the original Hewitt & Brown cyanotype drawings for the house is a sheet lettered SECOND FLOOR PLAN, SCALE ¼″ = 1′0″. Its title block reads, in the office’s classical hand-lettering with a V standing in for the U: RESIDENCE FOR MR C.S. PILLSBVRY, North East Cor. 1st Ave S + 22nd St, Minneapolis Minn. Every other printed field on the sheet — drawn by, checked, date, order number — is blank. So the drawing tells us what the house was meant to be, but not when it was drawn.
Five chambers, one bed room, and why the difference matters
The plan labels five principal bedrooms, and it does not call them bedrooms. They are CHAMBER No 1 through CHAMBER No 5, spread around the main block of the house. Then, tucked into the far corner of the service wing beyond a second staircase, there is exactly one room labelled BED ROOM No 1.
That is worth pausing on, because it quietly settles something we flagged as an open question when we read the attic-level sheet in an earlier post about the top floor of the mansion. That later survey mixed both words on one drawing and we could not tell whether the distinction meant anything. On the original second-floor plan the pattern is clean and consistent: chamber for the family’s rooms in the formal part of the house, bed room for the room reached off the service stair. Two vocabularies for two households living under one roof. We should be careful — a drawing convention is not a deed — but the geography of the sheet backs the reading up.
There are five bathrooms too, numbered BATH No 1 to No 5, plus a dedicated LINEN CLOSET off the upper hall and a long run of closets marked simply CLO. A private bath for essentially every principal bedroom was not standard even in a large American house of this period. It was the sort of thing you did when you were building at the very top of the market.
The room called the boudoir
Adjoining CHAMBER No 1, the largest of the principal bedrooms, the plan marks a separate small room: BOUDOIR. The word has drifted in modern English into something faintly risqué, but on an architect’s plan of this era it means something quite specific and rather domestic — a private sitting room belonging to the lady of the house, off her bedroom, where she wrote letters, dealt with the day’s correspondence and household business, and received people she did not want to receive downstairs. The conventional derivation is from the French bouder, to sulk: literally the room you withdraw to.
It was not the only sitting room upstairs. The plan also carries SITTING ROOM No 1 and SITTING ROOM No 2, each attached to its own chamber. The second floor of this house was not a corridor of bedrooms. It was a set of small private apartments.
And then there is the vault
The genuinely surprising label sits in the middle of that same suite. Between the boudoir and BATH No 1, hard against the column the drawing numbers Col. #16, is a small walled room with a single door. The architects lettered it VAULT.
A strongroom is not remarkable in a house of this size. A strongroom on the bedroom floor, opening off the principal suite rather than sitting in the basement or beside an office, is a different kind of decision. Whatever it was built to hold — and the drawing does not say — it was meant to be reached in a dressing gown, not fetched from downstairs. Silver, jewellery and papers are the obvious candidates. We would rather record the label than invent the contents.
Two staircases, and the logic of a service wing
The sheet shows two separate rooms both lettered STAIR HALL. One is the head of the great carved oak stair that rises out of the main hall. The other is at the far end of the service wing, beside BATH No 5 and the single BED ROOM.
That second stair is the whole social architecture of the house in one detail. It let staff reach every floor — the kitchen level below, the bedroom floor, the attic above — without ever appearing on the family’s stair or crossing the formal hall. The same logic runs through the ground floor, where a separate passage, servants’ dining room and butler’s pantry keep the working half of the house out of sight; we read that sheet in our post on the flower room and the original first-floor plan.
The drafting is precise enough to build from. The service wing’s outer wall is dimensioned at 25′-6″ overall, broken down bay by bay into runs of 4′-10½″, 2′-9″, 3′-9″ and 2′-1″, and the steel columns carrying the floor are numbered individually across the sheet — Col. #1 at the service corner, Col. #16 beside the vault. This was a steel-framed house, and the drawings never let you forget it.
Reading the drawings yourself
The original Hewitt & Brown drawings survive because architectural records survive when somebody decides they should. The University of Minnesota’s Northwest Architectural Archives holds the drawings and papers of hundreds of Upper Midwest firms, and it is open to the public — its guide to using the archives explains how to request material. For the wider context of why a building like this is protected at all, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is the place to start; the mansion was listed in 1974. And the Minnesota Historical Society’s digital newspaper collections are where the household appears in print, christenings, dinners and all.
More of the house’s story is on our own pages: building the mansion, the splendors that came out of England with it, and the Pillsbury family who lived behind these doors. The rest of the History Journal is here too.
See the stair for yourself
The second floor is private, but the stair that climbs to it is not. Year-round guided mansion tours run from the Club, and you can plan your visit or browse the full slate of experiences and tours before you come. Admission is by reservation only — and we would suggest arriving thirty to forty-five minutes early, because the best parts of a visit here tend to happen in the spaces between the scheduled bits.
Keep reading: Who Actually Built the Pillsbury Mansion?