Architecture
The Palmer Mansion was designed by architects Henry Ives Cobb and Charles Sumner Frost. The architects referred to its architectural style as Early Romanesque or Norman Gothic. Alternatively, the mansion was supposedly based on a German castle.
The mansion featured a three-story Italianate central hall under a glass dome. Other rooms were finished in a variety of historic styles: a Louis XVI salon, an Indian room, an Ottoman parlor, a Renaissance library, a Spanish music room, an English dining room that could seat fifty, and a Moorish room, the rugs of which were saturated with perfumes. A collection of paintings, collected by Bertha Palmer adorned the mansion's grand ballroom, 75-foot (22.9 m) long. The room's murals in the frieze above them were by Gabriel Ferrier.
The mansion's exterior included many turrets and minarets, and on the interior, a spiral staircase without a center support, rising 80 feet (24.4 m) into the central tower. Two elevators also served the building. The Palmers constructed their mansion's outside doors specifically without locks and knobs so that the only way to get in was to be admitted from the inside.
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