Just How Big Can You Build a House in Skyrim?

As a passionate Skyrim player and home decorator always looking to build my perfect customized manor, I often get asked: what’s the biggest house you can build in the game? While Proudspire Manor is certainly the largest property available for purchase, when it comes to constructing your own dwellings from the ground up, Lakeview Manor has the most potential for expansive additions that put it at the top in terms of total livable space.

Purchasing the Largest Readymade House

Without a doubt, Proudspire Manor in Solitude is the largest readymade property available for purchase in Skyrim. This sprawling mansion will cost you a whopping 25,000 gold to buy, with another 11,000 gold needed to upgrade it to its fully furnished status.

Once fully upgraded, Proudspire towers over the Solitude marketplace with an estimated 4,500 square feet of living space spread across two floors. That includes five spacious bedrooms, an alchemy lab, enchanting room, kitchen, dining room, basement library, and the biggest entryway of any home thanks to its grand curved staircase and open upper landing on the second floor.

You also get plenty of places to showcase your armors, weapons, and other treasures with five mannequins, fifteen weapon racks, and nineteen display cases peppered throughout the rooms. And we can’t forget the exterior patio furniture – perfect for entertaining guests with expansive views overlooking the city.

Frankly, Proudspire spares no expense or extravagance for being the ultimate bachelor pad any successful Dragonborn would crave. Some may argue the remote Castle Volkihar from the Dawnguard DLC provides even more room to roam across its network of linking corridors and wings, but remember it isn’t technically classified as a player-owned house.

Expanding the Hearthfire Homesteads

Now when it comes to constructing your own dwellings in Skyrim, the plots of land provided in Hearthfire now allow you to build truly massive customized manor estates from raw materials, with Lakeview Manor having the greatest potential livable square footage.

All three homesteads – Lakeview (Falkreath), Windstad (Hjaalmarch), and Heljarchen (The Pale) – give you basic small houses to start with, then offer three wings with basement levels that can be added on for 5,000 gold each. This immediately puts their maximum footprint on par with the size of Proudspire.

However, Lakeview pulls ahead by also providing the most spacious surroundings for supplementing your home with outdoor additions like apiaries, fish hatcheries, grain mills, and spare bedrooms. According to my own measurements, a fully decked-out Lakeview Manor sits at approximately 5,500 livable square feet including interior rooms and usable exterior spaces like patios and covered porches.

Here’s a comparison of maximum features across all three houses:

As you can see, while Lakeview and Windstad are pretty comparable, Heljarchen Hall’s remote snowy location makes adding those outdoor extras less practical. So Lakeview Manor squeaks ahead as the biggest total buildable property you can craft to your liking.

Notable Large Player Houses

A few other player houses provide some serious square footage worth mentioning:

Arch-Mage’s Quarters (Winterhold): As head of the College of Winterhold, you take up residence in expansive personal quarters with all crafting stations, five beds, unique displays, and direct access to the Hall of Attainment and Hall of Countenance which house eight more beds between them.

Dragonborn DLC Houses: The three new homes added on Solstheim each offer plenty for a wanderlust Dunmer like myself to settle down in. Severin Manor provides a built-in enchanting tower plus APIary while Glover Mallory’s House and Thirsk Mead Hall offer six and seven beds respectively to host all your followers and family.

Dawnstar Sanctuary (The Pale): The secret hideout fitted for the Dark Brotherhood Assassins guild isn’t just perfect for getting some shuteye between contracts. It also includes a full alchemy lab, arcane enchanter, lots of weapon racks and even a captive to practice your skills on – plenty of room for this Khajiit to prowl around.

Hjerim (Windhelm): Purchasing the upgrade to Calixto’s old House of Curiosities may be a mixed blessing with its bloody past, but the four-bedroom stone manor has plenty of square footage and display space befitting any distinguished war hero of Windhelm.

Vlindrel Hall (Markarth): This tucked-away manor overlooking the Dwemer city is my top pick for folowing the main storyline. Not only is Markarth the safest city in Skyrim (with all those guards everywhere), but Vlindrel Hall somehow squeezes in more weapon plaques and display cases than houses twice its size.

So while not as sizable as the major properties mentioned already, these notable houses demonstrate that true “largeness” ultimately comes down to how fully you can deck out interiors with upgrades and leverage your surrounding land – rather than just the footprint of the walls and roof themselves.

At the end of the day, what makes a perfect Skyrim home is completely up to your own preferences and playstyle needs. As the legendary Dragonborn hero and Thane of all the holds, you’ve definitely earned those Knows No Bounds Homebuilding perks! So build big my friends…and may you always have ample room to hoard every last septim and collectible your conquests can yield.