Inside the Charles J. Martin House, Lowry Hill's Landmark on the Hilltop

A well-preserved urban estate

The Charles J. Martin House, completed in 1903 in the Renaissance Revival style, is one of the best-preserved examples of an early-twentieth-century urban estate anywhere in the city. The mansion and its grounds occupy almost a full acre at 1300 Mount Curve Avenue, and the property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The house is enormous by any measure, with roughly 14,300 square feet of floor space, ten bedrooms, eleven bathrooms and the kind of richly detailed living and dining rooms that the milling fortunes of the era could pay for. A gracious foyer and library anchor the main floor.

When the house came onto the market a few years ago for the first time in some thirty-five years, it carried an asking price in the millions, a reflection both of its scale and of its place at the literal high point of the neighborhood.

Why it sits where it does

The Martin House occupies what is generally cited as the highest point in Minneapolis, a siting that was no accident. The families who built on Mount Curve wanted the view, the air and the prominence that came with the ridge.

Preservationists prize the house precisely because so little has been stripped from it. Where many estates of its era were carved into apartments or lost their outbuildings, the Martin House retains the integrity that earned it landmark status.

A well-preserved example of an early-20th-century urban estate, listed on the National Register since 1978.

A landmark, on the record

The Charles J. Martin House at 1300 Mount Curve Avenue, designed by the prominent Minneapolis architect William Channing Whitney and built in 1903 in the Renaissance Revival style, was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 26, 1978, and is a designated city landmark. At roughly 14,000 square feet on nearly an acre, it is the most-cited example of the early-1900s 'city estates' that gave the hill its character.

It was built for Charles J. Martin, an executive in the milling and insurance world whose fortune was typical of the families who claimed the ridge. The semicircular drive, the ornamental wrought-iron fence and the double set of gates that historians describe were as much a statement of arrival as the house itself.

Why it still matters