Welcome to the Bon Ton — the district where Bozeman's boom-years money built its finest houses, and where the stories are even better than the architecture.
Over an easy stroll you'll meet twenty-five remarkable homes: a German brewer who stowed away to America at seventeen and cast a bathtub to fit his three-hundred-pound frame; ranchers and lumber barons; and the restless imagination of local architect Fred Willson, whose fingerprints are all over these streets. Queen Anne turrets, deep Craftsman porches, leaded glass, and one gloriously eccentric house that has to be seen to be believed.
Do one neighborhood or all six — take the whole afternoon or just twenty minutes.
Each home on the map opens its own short story, told as you stand in front of it.
The walk builds to the site of the grandest house of all — and shows you what once stood there.
The tour ends at the site of the Nelson Story Mansion — once the grandest house in Bozeman, long since demolished. Here it's brought back to life, revealed as it stood in its prime.
A "then and now" reveal that rebuilds the lost mansion before your eyes — free to every walker.
Tim has spent his working life in real estate — for many years as a partner in a Central London brokerage, which is to say he knows a good house when he sees one, and has sold a fair few. In an earlier and entirely imaginary life he might have been a professional sportsman, or a leading man of the stage; in the real one he showed no gift for either, and property was kind enough to have him.
In 2012 he did the thing people talk about but rarely do — left something good behind and moved to Bozeman, better for his own wellbeing and his wife's than anything he'd have found by staying. He still works in the field, with a good number of Montana deals behind him in both homes and land.