I stayed a night at the historic Orman Mansion in Pueblo. Here's how it went.

Pueblo is abundant with historic properties from the city’s treasured past that are still standing today — may the storied original Mineral Palace live on in the historic zeitgeist — but the Orman-Adams mansion stands out as one of the grandest residential properties in town.

I noticed, while checking public records last summer, that an LLC associated with the Koncilja family had purchased the property. I recently reached out to the Konciljas to ask them about their plans for the property. While the four brothers were giving me a tour, they offered me a complimentary stay of one night at the home, so I took them up on it.

As I described in another article about the purchase of the building, they’re opening up the building as a short-term rental for the time being, but that’s not what they want to do with it long-term: The mansion could be an event venue for weddings, corporate retreats and private parties.

They’ve listed the building on multiple short-term listing sites and have hosted some guests, but it hasn’t been booked solid. People have come from both out of town and in town, curious about the mansion that's been largely closed to the public for decades.

“People that have stayed here from in town appreciate the fact that they can come here, because there really hasn't been any opportunity to do that in the last quarter century,” Joe Koncilja said.

The rental is pricier than some other offerings in the Pueblo area — the average price per night in Pueblo is $111, per Airbnb. But that’s still less than half of the statewide average for such short-term rentals, which is $277 per night.

One of the AirBNB reviewers noted that the house didn’t have a functioning TV, but added: “I actually think it improved our stay.”

I asked the Konciljas about this when I toured the home.

“We like people to enjoy the home kind of how it would have been enjoyed back then: That's why we have all these really cool seating areas throughout the house, so we try to encourage that more than anything," Koncilja said. "The idea is to be more intimate with people and the house itself."

They have installed wifi, though.

I had a great evening experiencing and exploring the mansion, which has bedroom after bedroom and too many couches to count. The mansion would be an ideal space to play the most epic game of hide-and-seek.

The building has a storied list of historical occupants, and some of their photos line the walls. I don’t believe in ghosts or the paranormal life, but my boyfriend, who tagged along with me, has seen quite a few horror movies and felt wary.

I pulled up the Wikipedia pages of the highest-profile previous inhabitants and read that they didn’t pass away in Pueblo — which I think helped assuage some of his concerns.

We ate a takeaway dinner in one of the multiple sitting areas for food and hung out in one of many sitting areas. We played a board came that I packed along with me — there are also puzzles in the third-floor rec room. Monopoly would be a fun game to play at the Orman Mansion to recreate the vibes of Gilded Age cutthroat capitalism, but we were staying on a weeknight and I didn’t want to stay up until 1 a.m.

Like many American workers today, I sometimes struggle to maintain a healthy balance between work and my personal life, especially when I work from home.

But at the Orman Mansion, the distinction between the different floors of the house was palpable. The first floor, replete with ample couches and seating areas, was for socializing and chilling, while the second floor was dominated by the bedrooms, plus an intimate sitting area in the large room between them.

Maybe the Victorians were onto something by compartmentalizing different functions into distinct spaces.

I was also thinking about how the original inhabitants of the house in the Pueblo Gilded Age definitely had servants and domestic labor. First of all, the house is ginormous: Vacuuming everything would take hours. Heck, the house actually has a now-defunct dumbwaiter for moving stuff from the basement up to the third floor.

Servants were vital to maintaining the upkeep of the grounds, cleanliness of the interior and lifestyle of the wealthy inhabitants, but they were confined to the periphery of the house, in the basement and upper attic. They had their own internal staircase that was, at one point, replaced with an elevator that still works today.

The average size of American homes — and the suburban frontiers that seep into the landscape — have been ever-expanding. The median size of a new single-family home was 1,525 square feet 50 years ago in 1973, but it was 2,273 square feet in 2021.

The latest numbers are a slight decrease from in the mid-2010s: The median size of new homes has gone down by a few hundred square feet.

And, of course, homeownership is becoming increasingly out of reach for younger and working-class Americans as wages have failed to grow proportionately with the ever-growing cost of living. The slight shrink in home size could be because of the shrinking size of American households or because larger houses are becoming more difficult for most people to purchase.

My experience at the 9,000-square-foot mansion made me ponder: How much interior space do we actually need to live and be comfortable? I loved spending the night in spacious luxury at the mansion, but nobody needs that much space to themselves.

But the ample space in the mansion, and the Victorian layout, showed me how I can reconceptualize how space functions in my own cozy home. Work and home life can blur together when I work from home, so exploring the distinct spaces at Orman Mansion has made me think about how I can create those mental and spatial boundaries at my current abode without literally building new walls.

I also savored a break from screen time and the streaming-industrial complex that I often turn to during the evening. I’m almost constantly on my laptop and/or phone for my job during the workday, so I appreciated spending some mindful time with my dear boyfriend in an ornately decorated home.

Anna Lynn Winfrey is a reporter at the Pueblo Chieftain. She can be reached at awinfrey@gannett.com or on Twitter, @annalynnfrey.

This article originally appeared on The Pueblo Chieftain: Winfrey: I stayed a night at the Orman Mansion. Here's how it went.