English: Built in 1857, this Romanesque Revival-style house, often touted as an example of the German Rundbogenstil, was designed by August Kutzbock of Kutzbock and Donnel, and was initially home to Alexander A. McDonnell, and his wife, Francie McDonnell. The house later was home to J. H. Garnhart and Rebecca Garnhart, whom owned the Garnhart Reaper Works, Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice and US Representative Orasmus Cole, whom married the widowed Rebecca Barnhart, Sarah Fairchild Dean Conover, sister of Wisconsin Governor Lucius Fairchild, and George Pierce and Carrie Pierce, whom operated a boarding house in the mansion between 1906 and 1938. The house was renovated and converted into an apartment building sometime after the time that the Pierce family owned it, which enclosed many of the historic features inside the walls and behind newer elements in a very foresighted move to preserve them for future use.

The house features sandstone block walls with a side and front gable roof, extruded corner pilasters and corbels, several layers of corbeling below the roofline, roman arched windows, four-over-four and two-over-two double-hung windows, quatrefoil windows on the side gables, a rooftop belvedere with chamfered corners, featuring a bracketed cornice with dentils and a low-pitch roof, cast iron railings and porches with ornate, intricate designs and slender iron columns, decorative window headers and pilasters trimming the windows, a front door with an arched transom flanked by arched niches and engaged columns, chimneys with dentils and blind arched panels, a three-story cast iron porch on the side facade with an iron staircase, one-story bay windows on the first floor below the front and side gables, oxeye windows on the rear gable, a one-story rear ell with a hipped roof, and stone turrets at the corners with decorative bases and caps. The interior features the historic woodwork, doors, wooden floors, Victorian fireplace surrounds, decorative crown moulding, historic light fixtures, a staircase with intact woodwork and an intact banister and balustrade that spirals up through the house’s many levels, terminating in a tall carved wood newel post with an integrated light fixture on the first floor, and a well-preserved octagonal foyer with the original marble floor, crown moulding, plaster medallion at the ceiling chandelier, niches on the chamfered corner walls, and pocket doors.

The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, and is a contributing structure in the Mansion Hill Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997. The house is presently home to the Mansion Hill Inn, which has seen the restoration of the unique and distinctive house’s interior and exterior, and provides modern guest amenities. The house is one of the most interesting older houses in Madison, and demonstrates the influence of German culture on the development of the American Midwest.