Charles and Cindy Bluth were on a luxury RV trip around Colorado last year, with an eye toward scooping up a ranch to add to their portfolio of high-end homes, when a listing on Zillow caught Mr. Bluth’s eye.
To say it wasn’t exactly what the couple had been looking for would be a dramatic understatement. It was more fit for a prince than a cowboy.
Named Chateau V by the then-owners, the property, in Evergreen, Colo., an affluent mountain community outside Denver, looked like America’s answer to Versailles. The limestone home had a lighted colonnade, a turret and 12 dormer windows flanked by statues modeled after ones the sellers had seen in Monaco. Inside, there were 126 custom-made chandeliers.
Cindy Bluth thought her husband was crazy at first. Before he even saw it in person, his heart was set on the property and his head filled with ideas about how he could make it even more opulent. He quickly scooped it up for $9.5 million, closing the deal on his wife’s 70th birthday. First listed for $17.5 million, the property had been on and off the market since 2016.
“It’s a work of art,” said Mr. Bluth, 82, a builder based in Lake Tahoe and a longtime classical architecture enthusiast. “To my knowledge, there’s nothing like it in the Western United States.”
The Bluths are a rare breed among homeowners. There are relatively few homes across the country that could be aptly described as a castle, often the products of moneyed and eccentric Americans who dreamed of owning their version of a European-style château in their own backyard, complete with moats, gargoyles and observation towers .
Castles are often long-term, costly passion projects. They reflect a homeowner’s love of international travel or classic medieval architecture—and they have a tendency to get attention. A $60 million listing for a fairy-tale castle in Woodstock, Conn., with a moat and a dungeon, recently grabbed headlines across the country.
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But these houses come with unique maintenance issues, are expensive to run and, when it comes time to sell, they can be difficult to unload for even close to what the homeowner originally invested.
Joanne Johnson, 68, and her husband Bruce, 72, drew some of the inspiration for their castle-style estate in Fayetteville, AR., from their travels around France and Italy. “We really liked the ruined look,” she said. “We liked all the stone, and we liked the cobbledyness of it.”
Their castle journey began with the acquisition in the mid-2000s of a plot of land that overlooked the Ozarks. They wanted to build a house that could best take advantage of the views. That quickly turned into an idea to build some kind of tower. Then, the tower became a castle. Their architect, who had previously focused on more contemporary homes, had received a book about castles around the world as a gift. They flicked through it together for ideas.
“He would open the book and say, ‘Well, would you like pierced railings at the top? Would you like a crenelated banding around the top?’” Ms. Johnson recalled.
For the interior, they worked with an interior designer friend from New York who specialized in classical design. Together, they came up with a design that combined swaths of solid oak, cherry and walnut, with moldings, custom hand-carved panels and corbels in the Corinthian and Tuscan styles. The centerpiece of the home, the great room, has high-beamed ceilings with hand-carved paneling. The 70-foot observation deck overlooks the Boston Mountains. The couple named the property Dromborg. Ms. Johnson said the name was derived from the idea that man has the ability to fulfill big dreams.
Ms. Johnson said she prides herself on the home being livable. “Some castles are very overdone,” she said, noting that some other castle owners use fake stone or display full suits of armor. Her castle was meant to be more informal. “It was always meant to look more humble,” she said.
After he recently and unexpectedly became the owner of a Medieval-style castle in the suburbs of Rochester, near Detroit, Brent Gatecliff learned the hard way about the particular maintenance issues that can come with castle-style homes. Mr. Gatecliff, 64, a retired mechanical contractor, accepted the home as collateral when he lent the castle’s original owner money a few years ago. When the owner defaulted on his debts, Mr. Gatecliff said he was forced to take possession.
“What was I thinking, right?” Mr. Gatecliff said with a laugh.
Stepping onto the property was like stepping back to the era of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Sitting on about 6 acres, the property was surrounded by a wrought iron fence and two gated towers. There is a moat, a drawbridge and a portcullis. The prior owner James LeBlanc had built the property as a gift for his wife Vera.
For the first six months after he took over the 26-room property, Mr. Gatecliff said he kept finding new passageways, drawers and cupboards as the home slowly revealed itself. In the office, a bookshelf rotates to expose a secret reading room. In a children’s bedroom, an escape hatch in the floor opens up to a hidden playroom. There was also a “dungeon” with a Tudor-style pub and faux stalagmites, Mr. Gatecliff said.
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“If you were putting your castle mentality on, it’s where you would be able to hide from your captors,” Mr. Gatecliff said. “Nobody would know where you were.”
He did some castle-specific troubleshooting, figuring out how to raise and lower the portcullis. He is still working out how to work the drawbridge, which is operated with a pump and a mounted controller.
Brokers who have listed castles said they have had mixed success. The costs of building such estates can become a runaway train, requiring special materials or the work of specialty contractors, and sellers can be disappointed when they find they won’t recoup those costs in a sale. While the typically generates significant interest, buyers are rarely willing to pay as much as it cost to build the property.
Case in point: the Johnsons have had their Arkansas home on and off the market since 2018 in an attempt to downsize. So far, there have been no takers. The property is currently listed for $4.6 million. It was first listed for $8.7 million but that price included additional acreage and a home next door that is no longer included.
Mr. Gatecliff has listed his property on and off since April 2021 in an effort to recoup his funds and has no intention of moving in. His girlfriend doesn’t like to go there, he said. While the property still hasn’t sold, Mr. Gatecliff’s agent, Michael Kuligowski of Signature Sotheby’s International Realty, said he has been pleasantly surprised by the level of interest and requests for showings.
“Mike’s pre-approving everybody, so it isn’t just, ‘Hey, I want to go play Fortnite and see a castle,'” Mr. Gatecliff said. “It’s real people with real money who are serious buyers. More than I thought would be out there, for sure.”
Mr. Gatecliff said Mr. LeBlanc had spent more than $10 million to build the Michigan property in the early 1990s, roughly four times the $2.299 million he is currently asking for the property.
Randall D. Veselka, seller of Chateau V, said he and his wife worked on the project for more than 12 years and spent close to $15 million on the land and construction. They ended up putting the house on the market because the elevation had become problematic for his wife. He estimated the cost would be closer to $30 million in today’s environment. Mr. Bluth was able to buy it for less than a third of that amount.
Real-estate agents said these types of properties tend to attract buyers that are larger-than-life characters.
A few years ago, Las Vegas agent Rob Jensen listed Rose Manor, an early Victorian-style castle designed in the 1980s, for $3.95 million. It was located in an affluent, gated community known as The Lakes. It drew a range of people with big personalities.
The property was ultimately purchased in 2019 for $3.25 million by Zoltan Bathory, the founder and rhythm guitarist of Las Vegas-based heavy metal band Five Finger Death Punch.
Mr. Bathory, a Brazilian jujitsu enthusiast and designer car collector, is renovating the property, Mr. Jensen said. Mr. Bathory didn’t respond to requests for comment.
John Zanotti, 57, a healthcare consultant for labor unions, said he went to an open house for a castle-style property in Wellington, Fla., on a whim with his wife last year. The listing had popped up on Zillow and the couple, who never realized there was a castle in their area, were curious and thought it might make for a fun afternoon out. They are never intended to buy the place.
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“If you’d told me I’d buy it, I would have said, ‘You’re crazy, that ain’t gonna happen,'” said Mr. Zanotti, who originally hails from New York’s Hell’s Kitchen area.
Designed to be a replica of a 15th-century castle in County Cork, Ireland, the stone property resembled a fort or some kind of citadel with two imposing crenelated towers on either side. It was a 30-year-long labor of love by a local man named Bruce Woods, who built it for his then-wife.
Driving up the dirt track to the house, Mr. Zanotti could already see its potential and dreamed of calling it Shelby Castle, after his late daughter who died in 2015. He and his wife agreed to buy it on the spot, paying $827,000 in cash, just above the $825,000 asking price. He joked that she couldn’t say he didn’t treat her like a princess.
Mr. Zanotti planned to spruce up the property’s interior, which looks like a regular modern home, to make it more in keeping with the castle look and even wanted to build a moat and two guard houses. He would display helmets and spears. However, he has been hampered by material and contractor shortages and distracted by the construction of another home he is building for his family nearby. Earlier this year, he agreed to relist the property for $1.495 million after his realtor, Marcello F. Fabbri, told him its value had increased substantially.
Castle owners said they’ve inadvertently become local celebrities. Ms. Johnson said tourists sometimes randomly walk up to take pictures of their Arkansas castle and they get requests for photo shoots and weddings, few of which they accept. Once, they allowed a television commercial to be shot there, which involved a woman sitting around the pool in a bikini in the freezing cold. “They brought in plants,” Ms. Johnson said. “They were trying to make it look like she was in Europe.”
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