Stop Everything, check out a Life-sized Victorian Dollhouse for Rent

I‘ll admit it’s a completely delusional exercise, but I do it anyway, staring wide-eyed at dreamy historic homes where I could act out my own Daphne du Maurier novel. Today’s property du jour, found wandering the internet, is a National Historic Landmark, a unique octagon-shaped and domed Victorian style house known as the Armour–Stiner House. It’s currently for rent…

DIY Historic Abandoned Homes For Sale!

We look at a lot of abandoned places here on MessyNessyChic; we take a look around the empty shells, wonder why such wonderful places could be left abandoned and then go about our day. But what about going a step further and actually entertaining the idea, the possibility, the dream of buying a forgotten historical…

Inside the 150 Year-Old Skeleton of an Unfinished Octagonal Palace

She’s a beauty isn’t she? Pictured here after she was abandoned in the 1930s by a cotton baron’s family that were never able to finish their dream home, Longwood mansion is an extraordinary antebellum plantation house that still stands to this day in Natchez, Mississippi. It’s the largest octagonal house in the United States and despite the ornately-finished…

My Little Antique Town

There are some good things about growing up and becoming an adult, for instance, not missing out on historic little towns such as this because we’re too busy nagging our parents about when we’ll get to the water park. Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania is the type of place my mother would have had to drag me…

Saving Pie Town: The Last Pie-O-Neers of the American Dessert

As the legend goes, PieTown, New Mexico was founded in the early 1920s by a man called Norman, who had filed a mining claim in the area and opened a general store at the desert crossroads where he liked to bake pies made from scratch and serve them to his family or passing travellers. Word spread about…

The Wreckers of New York City, 1951

It’s an enduring, ongoing cultural conflict everywhere in the world: progress vs tradition. There are those for “progress”, be it visionary forward-thinkers or money-driven demolishers of precious history and culture. Then there are the “traditionalists”; identified as either pillars of reason and impeccable taste or bitterly out-of-touch relics who really ought to quit their hollering, move aside and let the rest of…

My Little Lighthouse Hotel

For anyone else who has ‘stay overnight at a lighthouse’ on their list of things to do, meet me at the Saugerties Lighthouse, a two hour drive from Manhattan in the Hudson Valley. Ditch the car and walk a half a mile up the peninsula where the lighthouse will finally emerge from the tall grass, cut…

Moving Day! The House that was Sawn in Half and Shipped across the Bay

Sawn in half with a chainsaw, wheeled down the streets of San Francisco, stuck on a barge at Marina Green and moved across the bay to Belvedere– it’s safe to say it was no ordinary moving day for the Knowles-Moffitt Mansion on July 3rd, 1962. Sawn in half, the Victorian mansion sits on a barge waiting…