A Tour of the Homes

While we were in the city we toured four different houses with very different styles: a preserved mansion, a restored mansion, a rebuild plantation, and the crazy house. Many of these homes do not allow you to take pictures in the house but you can take them outside so I will do my best to share the best memories and what few photos that I do have.

Aiken-Rhett House (link)

Looking out over the back yard

This home was preserved, this means it is oldy-moldy. The tour of this house was very different from any of the houses we toured in that they handed us a MP3 player and headphones and told us to listen. It was interesting because there wasn't much talking to anyone else, mainly you just looked at what it told you to look at. The house was not well ventilated but it seemed to have so many historic things like the original wallpaper, molding, the lack of bathrooms, and slave quarters.

I think this was the outhouse, a million miles from the house

Walking up the back stairs

This house was a wonderful tour, since the house was preserved so much of it was intact or in those rare instances rebuilt (these were due to hurricanes or other weather related events). I think my favorite part was the ball room, which was very small in comparison to what I expected, but one of the ladies of the house had turned it into her bedroom and that was awesome!! You could see where her bed was because of the marks in the ceiling where the bed curtains hung. The porch was pretty spectacular too I could totally envision myself sitting out there with a fan and some sweet tea.

The Nathaniel Russell House (link)

I love my dad, we had so much fun

The Nathaniel Russell house has been restored meaning it has been taken back to what it would have been at been at it's glory days. Now this house still smelled like paint and sawdust since they had only been open a few days but it was so neat to see the cool stuff. Again there aren't really any pictures since you can't take any but what I did see is most definitely worth the tour. This house had a guide which showed us around 6-8 different rooms and we were one of the last tour groups to go up the floating staircase.

Since the house had been restored much of the original paint or something close to what they think could have been the right color. One the rooms was partially restored, you could see very minor details around the fire place but in the music room they had removed about 20 layers of paint (the docent's number not mine) and the fine detail was amazing. It was so pretty and there was so much detail in the wood work and around all of the windows.

The floating staircase is incredible, it is only connected to the floors so between each floor the staircase floats because it is not attached to the walls. There are several of these throughout Charleston and there preservation is incredible. I think it is important to note that there weren't really nails back then the staircase is made only of wood, so cool.

Such an amazing couple, I am blessed

This house also had a pretty awesome garden so I thought I would give you a few pics of the flowers.

Boone Hall Plantation (link)

The tour guide wore a period outfit, neat

This was the only plantation that we toured and I will admit that I was just a little underwhelmed by the house. This is not an original plantation home but a house build around 1960 to look somewhat like a plantation house. It is very pretty and we only saw 2-3 rooms in the house because someone lives on the upper floor sometimes, what?!?

The best part of this tour was actually the existing slave cabins and the Gullah Culture Show. The cabins were so small I have no idea how an entire family would live in the cabin. In the Culture Show the speaker talked about how hard it was to be a slave and how they tried to keep hold of their own culture and stay alive. In addition, the slaves in Charleston made sweetgrass baskets and have since they came over on the ships. These baskets were incredible but somewhat out of my price range, they were about 60 for the smallest basket.

I don't know if you recognize the streams behind us but they are in the Notebook. They filmed the outdoor lunch/picnic at this plantation so that was cool. In addition, Blake Lively and Ryan Renoylds got married here. I am not sure why they didn't invite me but it was still cool to be in the same place that they were. I think the other highlight is actually the alley of the oaks, as you drive in the street is lined with huge oak trees that are beautiful.

This is what I think of when I think of plantations

Calhoun Mansion (link)

The very first house that we toured was the Calhoun Mansion and boy was it a trip. As this was the first one I had no idea what to expect but what I got wasn't this. I think I should start by saying that people live in this house, yes all the time. Also there are apartments in the basement that you could rent. The people that live here have decorated it with anything and everything pretty much to their hearts content. I think the tour guide mentioned 6-7 different 18-wheelers full of stuff. I think one woman said it best, "if it wasn't such nice stuff, they would be called hoarders." Yeah I totally agree with that statement.

 Now there were a few originals to the house like light fixtures from Tiffany, that were very pretty. I think the stories about the different owners were some of my favorite parts, I loved the stories about the Navy turning it into barracks during WWII (I think). They did so much damage but at some point they also protected several of the rooms by putting up walls across the doors so no one knew they were there.

I enjoyed this house and the detail work of the building was amazing but the decor was just a little bit much for my tastes. I really have no idea how the owners live in that space because it would make me crazy but it was neat to see all of the different things and the originals. I also think the tour guide was fantastic so that could have been it, who knows.


I wish I could have taken more pictures inside the houses for you to see what I saw but I guess you will just have to go and see it for yourself. There are still several different houses that I didn't see and several plantations. It was so fun to picture myself as a lady of the manor wandering through the house offering tea to people. These were some of the best things that I enjoyed about the city, if you go you should definitely hit up some of these or let me know what you check out.