DENVER, Colo. — The house has hosted U.S. presidents, foreign dignitaries and celebrities who've walked the marble floors during the many parties that take place inside this spacious manse located on prime downtown real estate.
But those who've lived at what officially is the Governor's Residence at the Boettcher Mansion say it comes with a price: limited privacy and isolation.
"It's a beautiful building, but it is like living in a fishbowl," said former Gov. Bill Owens, whose family lived at the mansion for two years before moving back to a private residence.
"I didn't enjoy living there," said Gov. Bill Ritter, whose term ends in January. "The Governor's Residence is a gated community of one."
Now, Gov.-elect John Hickenlooper is struggling with whether to move into the home. The Denver mayor and his wife, Helen Thorpe, already own a 3,400-square-foot home in Park Hill and aren't sure they want to give up that Denver neighborhood.
"We haven't made up our minds," Hickenlooper said. "Neither of us have ever seen the (private residence upstairs in the mansion). I'd like to live there, although Helen hasn't seen it."
And the couple isn't sure what's best for their 8-year-old son, Teddy.
"There are 16 kids that live on our block in Park Hill," Hickenlooper said.
That compares with a neighborhood around the mansion at East Eighth Avenue and Logan Street that is mixed use - high-rise apartments, offices and some parking lots and businesses.
A wrought-iron fence rings the mansion, and visitors use an intercom to get in.
Hickenlooper said one option might be to live part-time in the mansion and return to Park Hill on the weekends.
If Hickenlooper chose not to live in the mansion, he'd be only the second governor, after Owens, to forgo taking up residence at the home since it was willed to the state in 1959 by the Boettcher family.
The state initially rejected multiple attempts by the family to donate the home as a governor's residence, but then-Gov. Stephen McNichols finally accepted the house on the state's behalf.
The downstairs portion of the home, about 6,000 square feet, is open to the public for scheduled tours and events, and can be rented by groups. That area is where some of the most lavish furnishings, from a marble well brought from Italy to a Steinway piano signed by Liberace (complete with a doodle of a piano with a tiny candelabra), are displayed.
The upper residence portion of the mansion occupies about 7,000 square feet, with six bedrooms and seven bathrooms. There are some furnishings, but many governors choose to bring some of their own stuff.
Unlike some governor's mansions around the country, there is no domestic staff to attend to the governor's family in Colorado. The family does its own shopping, cooking and cleaning in the residence.
Downstairs in the public area, though, a staff cleans and maintains the area and prepares food for events.
For the Ritter family, living in the mansion was an economic necessity. The governor makes $90,000 a year, and Ritter, then with two children in college and two at home, said passing up free housing wasn't an option.
But for his two teenage children, it meant leaving friends behind in their Platt Park neighborhood. (The Ritters rented out their home when they moved to the mansion.) The public space, constantly in use downstairs, and the security the children had to pass through was uncomfortable, Ritter said.
Owens said much the same.
"Almost every night, there is a reception downstairs," he said. "If you choose not to join them, people downstairs wonder why. So you have to kind of hide upstairs."
That might be less of a problem for Hickenlooper.
"I am more of an extrovert," he said. "If I was upstairs and there was a party going on downstairs, you might have to hold me back to keep me from going downstairs."