Last summer I visited House on the Rock in Spring Green as a bookend to a tour of nearby Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio. The photos I’d seen of this tourist spot did not prepare me for its size or the sheer spectacle of it.
READ MORE FROM OUR “WEIRD WISCONSIN” FEATURE HERE.
And against Wright’s calm, visionary property, the House probably seemed even stranger. The sprawling complex – built on the 60-foot Deer Shelter Rock as a home for Alex Jordan Jr., a collector of “antiques” and oddities – opened to the public in 1960.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
It’s grown into a maze of interconnected buildings and gardens, and believe me, you want the map they give you at the entrance. One famous feature is the Infinity Room, a cantilevered, vertigo-inducing hallway with over 3,000 windows jutting out above the landscape that gives the illusion that you’re looking out into the endless beyond.
There’s the all-red Carousel Room, with its enormous merry-go-round of animal characters and 20,000 twinkling lights. Another room is packed with musical instruments that appear to play themselves. There are creepy doll collections, gun collections and rooms with low ceilings, shag carpeting, no windows and a stale smell. Around me that afternoon, aside from what has to be the weirdest collection of stuff in Wisconsin, were young families, couples, teens and older people – all seemingly joined by curiosity and wonder in the state’s most surreal attraction.
