The Largest Private Residence in Every State

A man’s home is his castle, so the saying goes. In the case of certain homeowners in the U.S., their home is a castle, a palace, a villa, a château, or a manor. Across America, there are private residences of incredible size. These can be old or new and in any architectural style (or combination of styles). Some are historical landmarks; some are located in enclaves of eye-watering wealth. 

To identify the largest residential home in every state, 24/7 Tempo reviewed The Largest Residential Home in Every U.S. State, compiled by the home services website Angi. To assemble their list, Angi consulted a variety of blog posts, online listings, and local newspaper articles. They verified residential status and square footage from the real estate site Zillow. Where conflicting information on the size of a property was found, they chose the most frequently quoted record, the record from the most reliable source, or the most specific record – for instance, 72,215 rather than 72,000 square feet. Data was collected in February 2022. (These are the largest houses in America.)

Many of the homes on the list are the addresses of the absurdly rich and famous, and as such have names as outsized as their owners. Consider Washington state’s largest home – “Xanadu 2.0,” a 66,000-square-foot lakefront lodge in Medina built by Microsoft founder Bill Gates in 1995. The name is a nod to the fictional estate owned by Charles Foster Kane, the main character in the film “Citizen Kane,” itself inspired by the real-life Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California.

Then there’s Florida’s Versailles, the third-largest residence on the list at 90,000 square feet, owned by David Siegel. The Lake Windermere home has 11 bedrooms, 22 bathrooms, five kitchens, and a 35-car garage. It was the subject of the 2012 documentary “The Queen of Versailles.”

We mentioned castles, and one of the country’s biggest is in Massachusetts – Searles Castle in Great Barrington, designed by the renowned architect Stanford White of McKim, Mead and White. Now owned by Hunt Slonem, it spans 54,246 square feet of living space.

There are also two private residences of more than 100,000 square feet on the list, one on each coast. The 105,000-square-foot Bel Air mansion in California sometimes referred to as The One was bought in March 2022 for $141 million by fast-fashion magnate Richard Saghian. Fair Field in The Hamptons on Long Island, owned by billionaire hedge-fund mogul John Paulson, weighs in at 110,000 square feet, twice the size of the White House. According to Angi, the house reportedly has 29 bedrooms, 39 bathrooms, three swimming pools, a synagogue, a theater, a basketball court, and a bowling alley. (These are the cities with the most expensive homes in America.)