The Rhineland castle on Peachtree Street

Amos Giles Rhodes was a furniture magnate with a bit of a crush on European medievalism. After a trip to the Rhineland in the late 1890s, he decided his Atlanta home needed to look less like a standard residence and more like a castle. He hired Willis F. Denny to design what they called Le Rêve - The Dream - and it took two years to finish this 9,000-square-foot Romanesque Revival beast in 1904.

To get that authentic fortress vibe, they hauled 500-pound blocks of granite from Stone Mountain, 25 miles away. It was high-tech for its day, too. While it looked like a medieval stronghold, it was fully wired for electricity with over 300 light bulbs, an early security system, and electric call buttons. They even imported mahogany from the West Indies just to make the interior sufficiently fancy.

Inside, the house contains a stained glass series depicting the Confederacy's rise and fall. It features medallion portraits of figures like Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and John B. Gordon, the head of the Ku Klux Klan in the State of Georgia. The house has had a strange career path since 1930, serving as a residence for a state historian and a warehouse for the Georgia State Archives until 1965.

The Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation took over in 1983. They even performed a bit of architectural surgery in 1990, moving the original main stairs and windows back into the house from a different building. Today, it functions as an office and an event space for weddings, corporate parties, and other gatherings.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons