Somewhere on a mountaintop above Lake George, tucked behind life-size lion statues and Gothic iron gates, sits a place that's hard to believe exists. Highlands Castle is the kind of property that sounds like a fever dream until you're standing on its terrace watching the light change over the Adirondacks, wondering how a single man with no architectural training, and a fundraising company to run managed to pull off what took most of his adult life to build. The short answer: he promised his kid. The long answer is considerably more interesting.
Location
Bolton Landing is a small hamlet on the western shore of Lake George in upstate New York, about an hour north of Albany. Lake George itself is worth knowing about before you arrive. Stretching 32 miles - it's the longest lake in New York State - it's clean enough to see 30 feet down in places, and has been called the "Queen of American Lakes" since at least the 19th century. The surrounding Adirondack Mountains give it a scale that sneaks up on you.
Highlands Castle sits three minutes from the Bolton Landing waterfront by car, though you'd never know it from the property. The estate is genuinely private - wooded, elevated, removed - with the kind of quiet that makes you realize how much ambient noise you've been tuning out. From the mountaintop where the castles sit, the panoramic view sweeps 180 degrees across the lake and into the mountains beyond.
John Lavender II, who built this place and still lives here with his wife Yvonne and their German Shepherd Major, says he had no idea the view existed when he bought the land in 1982. He uncovered the magnificent lakeview while clearing trees for the home's foundation.
A Divorce, A Diner, And A Promise That Took Forty Years To Keep
In 1978, John Lavender was 23, newly divorced, and sharing a townhouse in Clifton Park, New York, with five other guys. His son Jason was three. “This is not our home,” he told him. “This is temporary. Someday I’ll build you a castle.” He’s not entirely sure why he said “castle.” He liked log cabins at the time, and still does. But the word stuck.
It took five years to find the right land. John Lavender spotted a small ad in a local penny-saver circular when he stopped in for a quick cup of coffee at a diner while on a scenic drive around Lake George, put a quarter into a payphone, and bought a mountaintop in Bolton Landing, NY. John had founded a fundraising corporation in 1979. His new vocation helped schools raise funds to benefit their students and also allowed him to have summers off with his young son.
There would be an added bonus to choosing this career, as he could spend summers building their home. Lavender had no stamped architectural blueprints - just oversize sheets of poster paper with dimensions sketched out by hand. He and three carpenters would frame a few walls each day, and over time, the outward appearance began to take shape.
Friends helped. A few hired hands helped. When John’s son was a teenager, he joked, “I promised I'd build you a castle. I didn't say you wouldn't be helping me.” So Jason joined in, eventually even recruiting his high school football team to spend a summer doing stonework on the main home, which they named “Highlands Castle”. A thousand tons of local granite, laid up slowly over decades.
In 2008, Lavender fell backward off a ladder while working on the roof of Highlands Castle and shattered his right leg in 20 places. He spent eight months in a wheelchair and on crutches. His wife Yvonne - who he’d met in 1986 at the Sagamore resort in Bolton Landing, where she worked as an assistant manager, and married on the property in 1992 - found him on the terrace.
Recovery gave him time to think, and what he eventually thought was: open the doors. In 2010, they did. The castles have welcomed guests ever since. John and Yvonne live in their private section of the main house, handling almost everything themselves, save for a cleaning crew between stays.
Jason, for his part, went on to earn an architectural engineering degree from Penn State. The castle dad built without any training produced a son who studied buildings professionally. There’s something almost too neat about that.
Highlands Castle: Through The Gates
Iron gates flanked by life-size stone lions. The place announces itself immediately, and then keeps delivering. Highlands Castle is the original structure and the largest of the three, begun in 1982 and still evolving.
Walking through the front door, you enter a vestibule area anchored by mid-19th-century Romeo & Juliet stained glass doors that take you back in time. Look to your right, a grand staircase leads to the upstairs Royal Bedroom suite and a balcony overlooking the Great Hall.
Vestibule area
Lavender found those Romeo and Juliet doors at an antique dealer in Cape Cod sometime around 1979, years before he bought the land. These doors were labeled “Not for Sale” as they were the antique dealer's pride and joy. The dealer had owned them for 59 years, and they were his conversation pieces for his shop, and were originally designed by Tiffany for a Vanderbilt family home.
Lavender left his phone number and, a few months later, received a call from the dealer. He mentioned his health was failing, and asked Lavender if he would be interested in purchasing his doors. The doors now serve as the threshold between the entrance hall and the Great Hall, which is the heart of the building.
Great Hall
Great Hall
Twenty-five foot vaulted ceilings. Twenty-one floor-to-ceiling windows. European tapestries on the walls. Hand-carved wooden knights standing guard at the fireplace. Gothic antique furniture that Lavender bought - much of it - before he’d even finished construction, using the pieces as design references as he built around them.
It works as a formal dining space, a place to put your feet up, or something in between. Two large sofas, a grand antique table with chairs, the fireplace, the knights - it’s not understated, and it doesn’t try to be.
The views from those 21 windows change with the light and the season, and because the room sits at the elevation of the mountaintop, there’s nothing between you and Lake George below.
The King's Suite
King's Suite's sitting room
The King’s Suite occupies the majority of the lower level of Highlands Castle and has its own private entrance, which matters if you’re sharing the property with another group through the upstairs Royal Bedroom.
The suite is spacious by any measure: a king bed in the main bedroom area, a queen sofa sleeper in the living room, a cozy second bedroom tucked away with a queen bed, leather club chairs, and a table set into an octagon tower. The bathroom has a tiled shower, and there’s a curtain that can section off the bedroom from the living area if you need it.
What the King’s Suite does particularly well is outdoor access. You get two terraces - a screened-in covered one off the living room and an open one beyond it - both with lakeview. Sunrises, sunsets, and on a clear night, stars with very little light pollution to compete with.
The Royal Bedroom
The Royal Bedroom
Upstairs, the Royal Bedroom is the suite for two - one queen bed, a leather sofa, and a bathroom that earns its description. The centerpiece is a grand, oversized hand-hammered copper bathtub fitted with a rainfall showerhead, which is the sort of thing that photographs well but also functions as advertised in person. The room has its own ensuite bathroom with an interior lock on the door, and access to the upper lakeview terrace.
Booking the Royal Bedroom in Highlands Castle also gives you access to The Great Hall, which turns what might otherwise be a smaller suite into something with genuine grandeur attached. The stained glass doors, the knights, the 21 windows - you'll have it all to yourself, or you can share it with those you're traveling with, booking the King's Suite below, if that's how you've arranged it.
The Castle Cottage
Castle Cottage
A few steps from Highlands Castle, sitting side-by-side with the main house, The Castle Cottage was completed in 1995. It’s a self-contained mini-castle and sleeps up to six, though four is the comfortable count.
Castle Cottage's entry foyer
Two bedrooms with queen beds, an eat-in kitchen, a bathroom with shower, and a private outdoor terrace.
Castle Cottage's sitting room
The Castle Cottage shares the same elevation and orientation as Highlands Castle, which means the views of Lake George and the Adirondack Mountains are essentially identical to what you get from the big house - panoramic, high, and unobstructed.
The Castle Gatehouse
The Castle Gatehouse
The Castle Gatehouse sits in a different setting - a wooded pocket on the property rather than the open mountaintop - and finished construction in 1988. It sleeps up to seven across three bedrooms and two bathrooms: a king bed downstairs in a room with an ensuite walk-in tiled shower and a twin daybed built into a Gothic-arched wall nook, plus two more bedrooms upstairs (one king, one queen) sharing a second bathroom.
Downstairs bedroom
The upstairs Grand Room is the social center, with a full kitchen including counter seating, a dining table, reclining motorized leather sofas, a 65-inch television, and vaulted ceilings throughout. Lavender sourced the antiquities filling the space, and the furniture has the same eclectic, collected character as everything else on the estate.
The Terraces
The terraces are where Highlands Castle makes its most straightforward case. Elevated on a mountaintop, with 180-degree views across Lake George and the Adirondacks, they’re the kind of outdoor space that makes it harder to go inside. The upper terrace off the Royal Bedroom and the twin terraces of the King’s Suite all look out over the same expanse of water and mountain - just from slightly different angles.
Bolton Landing is three minutes away by car, with restaurants, boutique shops, a brewery, a wine store, a supermarket, and an ice cream parlor all within easy reach. The lake itself offers boat rentals, kayaking, paddleboarding, scenic cruises, public beaches, and hiking trails.
Lake George has 170 islands, many of them state-owned and open for camping. The water is clear enough in places to see 30 feet down. It’s a well-maintained part of upstate New York that doesn’t feel overrun, partly because it sits far enough off the main tourist circuits to attract people who have actually looked for it.
The castles, like the lake, reward the effort of finding them. John Lavender has been building this place for over four decades and still calls himself the steward of the property rather than its owner, adding, “Do we really own anything? We simply get to enjoy it for a moment”. “I believe I was led to this spot,” he says of the mountaintop he found in a penny-saver ad in 1982, “Stopping for a cup of coffee changed my life”. Whether you believe that or not, it’s hard to stand on one of those terraces and argue with the result.
19 Skyline Dr, Bolton Landing, NY 12814, United States
