Searles Castle (Massachusetts)

Searles Castle is a French chateau style house at 389 Main Street in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, commissioned in 1875 and completed in 1886 by Mark Hopkins, a treasurer and founder of the Central Pacific Railroad, for his wife Mary Sherwood Hopkins. Hopkins died in 1878 before the house was finished, and Mary later married Edward Francis Searles, who designed much of the interior; the architect of record was Stanford White of the firm McKim, Mead and White. The seven story house has about forty rooms, 54,246 square feet of floor space, thirty six fireplaces, and a basement room known as the dungeon, built in a mix of Renaissance and Chateauesque styles. Mary Hopkins Searles died in 1891 and Edward Searles kept the house until his own death in 1920; the artist Hunt Slonem purchased the property in 2021 for 3.25 million dollars.