Princess Peach’s Castle For Sale

Dear Mario: Please come to the castle. I’ve baked a cake for you.
Yours truly,

Princess Toadstool, Peach.

And so begins the adventure that is “Super Mario 64”. But as any good Nintendo Nerd knows, Mario’s trip to the castle isn’t exactly “peachy” from thereon. When he arrives at Peach’s palace, he learns from a tearful Toad that Peach has been captured by Bowser and that the castle has been taken over by his terrifying minions! (And they are terrifying—in one case Mario must face a giant penguin and even a small bunny named MIPS.)

While this news was all very disturbing the first time I played the game, I didn’t take Toad’s advice and visit that first painting to get the power stars. No, I took my time and decided to take a look around the castle. After all, nobody was around—it was kind of like snooping through someone’s refrigerator when you’re at their house alone. What—no one else does that?

Anyway, in my tour of the grounds I found that Peach’s castle was not only pretty plush, but also huge. It’s situated on a vast field, surrounded by rolling hills, a waterfall, a moat—oh, and it comes complete with several painting portals leading to other worlds.

This got me wondering, just how much did Peach pay for this pricey pad?

The answer is enough to make you lose your red cap: $950,972,940—almost a billion dollars. And that doesn’t even include the moat, the land, or the paintings.

Read on to find out how I came up with this bomb-omb of a number.

Let’s-a go!

How I Did It

As with any good novelty real estate post, I knew that if I wanted a realistic price for Peach’s castle, I’d need a few things other than Power Stars to get the answer. I’d need to find:

• The location
• The size
• Comparable Properties

The location wasn’t all that difficult to figure out, but when it came to calculating the castle’s size and finding comparable properties, well, that’s when things got “Super” tricky. But keep your overalls on— I’ll get to the difficult stuff in a minute. First, let’s cover the castle’s location.

Princess Peach’s Castle: Just a Green Pipe Ride Away

In “Super Mario 64”, Mario first arrives at Peach’s castle by way of green pipe—the preferred method of travel in Mario’s world. Unfortunately, he doesn’t pop out of the pipe into a busy terminal with signs or a ticket stub sticking out of his overalls to indicate where he’s actually ended up. So in order to find the real-world location of Peach’s castle, I had to put on my thinking cap (not to be confused with the Wing Cap—a dangerous mistake) and figure it out myself.

I knew just from touring the grounds that Peach’s castle had to be somewhere where there were plentiful, green, grassy fields; mountains and hills nearby; waterfalls; and where the days were long and sunny. That narrowed things down to about a million possible locations. I needed to figure out what it was that made Peach’s palace truly unique. And then it hit me: the mushrooms!

Peach is Princess Toadstool of the Mushroom Kingdom, after all, and these red and white-spotted ‘shrooms not only grow all over the place, but even work as Peach’s castle staff as Toads.

In real life, these cute little creatures are actually the Amanita muscaria mushrooms* which originated in certain coniferous forests in the northern hemisphere—like in Norway, for example.

So with A) green fields, B) long, sunny days, C) surrounding hills and mountains, D) waterfalls, and finally E) red and white-dotted mushrooms in mind, I came to the conclusion that Princess Peach’s castle must be in Norway—in particular, just northwest of Oslo where the grassy plains meet the mountains.

Unfortunately for Peach, this real-life equivalent of the Mushroom Kingdom is one of the world’s most expensive areas in terms of real estate. In fact, even though the palace ended up being bigger than Koopa the Quick’s ego, it really was this prime location near Oslo that pushed the price close to a billion dollars. But more on that when we take a look at the comparable properties—first, let’s take a look at just how Super Massive the castle really is.

*Fun Fact! In real-life these red and white-spotted mushrooms are often used as hallucinogenics. Just in case you’ve ever wondered why Super Mario is so weird.

A Peach of a Castle

Since my very complicated search for “Size of Princess Peach’s castle” turned out to be, well, fruitless, I had to rely on something even more evil than Bowser on a good day to get the job done: Math.

In the same way that I calculated the square footage of Zelda’s Hyrule Castle, I used a picture of Peach’s castle and something within the picture that I could actually get the real-life measurements for. I used the double front doors. Honestly, these doors must have been installed on the designer’s day off, because unlike you might expect, Peach’s castle does not come with a foreboding gate or a huge, arched entrance– it just comes with what look to be your average, run-of-the-mill, wooden double doors.

And according to Home Depot’s website, your average, run-of-the-mill, wooden double doors are a total of 72 inches wide. In this picture, it took 21 of these double doors to cover the width of the castle. That’s 21 x 6 feet per double door, and you get 432 feet for the castle’s width—for the first two main floors. (There is also the dungeon below and then the two-leveled tower. More on that in a moment.)

To get the depth of the castle, I turned to this photo. Based on the science of eyeballing it, I approximated that Peach’s castle was about three-quarters as deep as it is wide. So three-quarters of 432 feet is 324 feet. The first floor and second floor are each 139,968 square feet.

But what about the dungeon? In this same photo you can see that the dungeon is about six feet narrower on each side than the two main floors above it—so it is about 420 feet by 315 feet. That’s 132,300 square feet for the dungeon.

Okay, so we have the dungeon, and the two main floors of the castle. Now for the towers. In this picture, it looks like the first level of the tower is only about one-sixth of the total square feet of the first two floors. That’s 23,328 square feet.

The second level of the tower looks to be about three-quarters the size of the first, wider level of the tower. That’s about 17,496 square feet.

So adding it all up—the dungeon, the first floor, the second floor, the tower’s base, and then finally, the narrower level of the tower, you get a castle that is a whopping 453,060 square feet.

To put that into perspective for you, 453,060 square feet is roughly the size of the real-life Palace of Caserta, which is just over 473,000 square feet and is only the 14th largest palace in the world (the largest palace is the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul which is about 7,500,000 square feet!) And to compare Peach’s place to another in the land of fantasy, it is roughly the size of Hogwarts Castle.

But in order to find the price tag, I’d need some comparable properties in the Oslo area. Brace yourselves, readers; things are about to get expensive.

Oslo: Norwegian for Expensive?

Actually Oslo means “meadow at the foot of a hill,” which is also very fitting for Peach’s castle. But seriously—in looking for comparable properties in and around Oslo, Norway, I was blown away by some of the price tags.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find the prices for any princess castles with portals to other dimensions in every room, but I did find the prices for several very large and luxurious homes in the area. On average, the price per square foot for property near Oslo ended up being an absolutely ridiculous $2,099—that’s about three month’s rent for the area just under Peach’s Welcome mat. It’s no wonder the whole castle was so expensive.

So, How Much for Peach’s Castle?

Once I found the location, the size, and the average price per square foot for similar properties in the area, I was able come up with the final price. $2,099 times 453,060 is $950,972,940. That’s not even including the moat, the land, or the paintings that transcend space and time—which I’d imagine would tack on at least a couple of bucks.

Mamma mia!