One evening in 1926, a young British girl living in Shanghai had a mysterious dream. In her dream, she imagined she owned her own Hans Christian Anderson-style fairy tale castle. Charmed by his daughter’s imagination, the girl’s father, Eric Moller, decided to build a home in the image of his daughter’s dream castle. This new home not only recreated his daughter’s dream, but also incorporated elements commemorating Moller’s former life of Adventure. He hired an architect and invested a huge amount of capital into designing this Northern European-style castle villa. Located on South Shanxi road, the house was completed in 1936.

The villa’s main door is deceptively small, and when you walk inside you may not be prepared to be dazzled by the rich fairytale colors. Complete with Norwegian-style steeples, gothic pinnacles, Chinese style glass tiles, Tiger windows, Taishan face brick, and colored ornamental floor slabs; you will see niches for Buddhist statues collected together in one hall, and exquisitely carved decorations can be seen all over the house. Stained glass in inlaid into the domed ceiling and pagoda peaks of different heights, creating mysterious and marvelous contours. Coming to the Moller Villa is like visiting a magical North European village.

Today, Moller’s Villa has become the Hengshan Moller Villa Hotel. The hotel lobby, found on the first floor of the main building, is decorated in a tasteful and exquisite manner. Generally speaking, the hotel will not give you any trouble if you want to come in and tour the building, and you should definitely stop in for a visit if you have the time. Moller furnished this dream villa to look like a luxury ocean liner. You will find wooden carvings of nautical scenes, and even the floor is decorated with fine strips of wood, arranged to look seaweed and kelp. The finest of these wooden strips are only a few millimeters wide.

The villa stairway is separated into not two, but three sections. You can climb the stairs on one side and come down the stairs on the other. If you are not familiar with the layout of the hotel it is easy to get lost in this stairway maze. Each stairway is built to the same width, and each narrower the closer you get to the top.

If you are not a hotel guest, one thing you are not allowed to do here, unfortunately, is visit the hotel’s rooms, which are furnished with aristocratic-style furniture from the 1930’s. If you are not in a rush, you should take some time to sit in the hotel’s café. As the afternoon stretches into evening, walk to the yard in front of the building and gaze upon the villa under the lights. Moller villa is definitely the most beautiful at this time. It is truly a world out of your dreams.

The Moller family was not in Shanghai long before World War Two arrived on their doorstep. In 1941, the Japanese army entered the foreign concession. Moller’s entire family was forced into concentration camps, and Moller’s villa was converted into a Japanese club. After the war, the Kuomintang turned the villa into a general office, and today it is a hotel with rooms that you can book.