House on the Rock

The House on the Rock, near Spring Green in southern Wisconsin, is less a house than a labyrinth of one man's imagination. Alex Jordan Jr. began building on top of Deer Shelter Rock, a sandstone column rising above the forest, in the 1940s, later installing an electric hoist to lift materials. He opened it to paying visitors in 1959, and kept adding for three decades; the complex that exists today is a sprawling succession of rooms, streets and halls filled with the strangest collections in America.

The original house on the rock is intimate and dark: exposed stone, low ceilings and dark woodwork, with echoes of the Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Taliesin estate is nearby. A popular story claims Jordan built it to spite Wright; the House on the Rock itself firmly disputes it. The most famous single room is the Infinity Room, added in 1985, which later appeared in a film dream sequence alongside the carousel.

Then the complex opens into a dreamscape. The Streets of Yesterday recreate an early twentieth-century town; the Music of Yesterday is a huge collection of automated orchestras playing by themselves. The Heritage of the Sea hall is dominated by a 60-metre sculpture of a whale-like sea monster fighting a giant squid. And the Carousel — billed as the world's largest indoor carousel — spins with 269 carved animals, not one of them a horse, under 182 chandeliers, more than 20,000 lights and hundreds of mannequin angels hanging from the ceiling. It cannot be ridden; it is there to be stared at.

Neil Gaiman made the House on the Rock a key setting in his novel American Gods, and once you have walked through it, you understand why: few places feel so much like a portal to somewhere else.

Getting there

The House on the Rock is on Highway 23 near Spring Green, in the Wyoming Valley of south-western Wisconsin; Middleton, on the edge of Madison, is about 51 km away. The nearest airport is Dane County Regional Airport (MSN) in Madison, about 65 km away. The site is best reached by car.