Miramont Castle
Near Manitou Springs, Colorado
On the hillside above Manitou Avenue rises a genuine oddity, a four-story stone castle with nine different architectural styles jumbled together in one building. This is Miramont Castle, built in the fall of eighteen ninety-five. It was the private home of Father Jean Baptiste Francolon, a French priest from a wealthy aristocratic family who had traveled the world with his diplomat father, collecting architectural ideas as he went.
He served as his own architect, and it shows. The castle mixes Shingle-style Queen Anne, Romanesque, English Tudor, Flemish stepped gables, Elizabethan, Venetian, Byzantine, Moorish, and half-timbered Chateau elements, sometimes in the same room. Francolon's mother paid the Gillis brothers roughly fourteen thousand dollars to build it, and the work took years, quarrying all the stone locally and employing much of the town.
The name Miramont means look at the mountain. Even when new, it had indoor plumbing and electricity, luxuries of the day. Later the Sisters of Mercy took the castle over and ran it as the Montcalm Sanitarium for tuberculosis patients during the town's great era of chasing the cure.
Today it stands as a museum of more than forty rooms and over fourteen thousand square feet.
