Fairy Tale Castles and Storybook Houses Coloring Pages
A glass slipper gets left behind on the palace stairs, and two hungry children find a house they can eat. Fairy tales and legends are full of wonderful buildings, so I've gathered them all in one spot, from candy cottages in the woods up to the halls of the gods.
Jump to: Castles | Fairy Tale Palaces | Palaces of the Gods | Cottages | Legendary Places
Fairy Tale Castles
Real castles were built to keep enemies out, with thick walls and narrow windows for archers. Storybook castles take their look from later ones like Neuschwanstein in Germany, built in the 1800s by a king who loved old legends and never meant it to hold off an army.
Cinderella
The best-known Cinderella story is French, so her prince's palace is really a château, built for grand parties instead of battles. The most important thing in it was the clock, because the fairy godmother's magic ran out on the very last stroke of midnight...
Beauty and the Beast
In the old French story the Beast's castle ran itself. Invisible hands lit the candles and set the table, but the garden is what got Beauty's father into trouble, because he picked a single rose for her on his way out...
The Frog King
The Frog King is the very first story in the Brothers Grimm collection. The frog lived in a well beside the castle and fished out the princess's golden ball, as long as she promised to be his friend. Frogs have been wearing crowns for a long time, though, and the ancient Greeks told a funny story about a frog king who went to war with the mice...
Battle of the Frogs and Mice coloring pages
The Handsome Prince
Plenty of fairy tales have a prince who rides in to save the day, and most of them never get a name. In the old stories he's usually just "the king's son," which leaves you free to imagine him however you like.
Jack and the Beanstalk
Jack and the Beanstalk is an English tale, and the giant's castle sat up in the clouds at the very top of the stalk. Jack climbed it three times, and the last time he came home with a harp that could sing all by itself.
Camelot
Nobody knows where Camelot really stood (if it was real at all), and people have been arguing about it for hundreds of years. Some say it was Cadbury Castle, an old hill fort in Somerset, and others point to Winchester, where a huge round table still hangs on the wall of the great hall...
Troy
Troy was a real city in what's now Turkey, and its ruins were dug up in the 1870s. The Greeks said its walls were so strong that ten years of war couldn't knock them down, so they built a wooden horse to sneak inside instead...
Fairy Tale Palaces
A palace was built to show off rather than to keep anyone out, and the palaces in fairy tales show off more than most.
The Snow Queen
Hans Christian Andersen put the Snow Queen's palace far in the frozen north, on an island near the North Pole. It had more than a hundred halls made of drifting snow, and the only light came from the northern lights...
Aladdin
Aladdin is one of the Arabian Nights tales, but the story is actually set in China. The onion domes in most pictures of his palace come from Persia and India, and in the story the genie of the lamp built the whole thing in a single night...
The Little Mermaid
The sea king's palace sat at the deepest spot in the ocean. Its walls were coral and its tall windows were clear amber, and the roof was covered in shells that opened and closed as the water flowed past...
Palaces of the Gods
Gods needed homes too, and people usually put them somewhere nobody could easily visit, like a mountaintop, the bottom of the sea or deep under the ground.
Mount Olympus
Mount Olympus is a real mountain in northern Greece, the tallest in the country, and its top is often hidden in cloud. The Greeks said the gods lived up there in palaces built by Hephaestus, behind a gate of clouds that the Seasons opened and closed...
Poseidon's Palace
Poseidon's palace sat at the bottom of the sea, built of gold that never lost its shine. He kept his horses there too, and in some versions they were hippocampi, half horse and half fish, who pulled his chariot over the waves.
Poseidon coloring pages Hippocampi coloring pages
Hades
The Greeks put Hades' palace deep under the earth, across the river Styx, where sunlight never reached. Cerberus, his three-headed dog, guarded the gates and was happy to let everyone in, but he never let anyone back out...
Nyx
Night had a house of her own at the edge of the world, and the Greeks said she shared it with her daughter Day. When one went out to cross the sky the other came home, so the two of them never stood under the same roof...
Valhalla
Valhalla was Odin's great hall in Asgard, with a roof made of shields and spears for rafters. Brave warriors went there after they died, and every evening they feasted on a magic boar that was whole again by morning...
Norse mythology coloring pages
Cottages
Fairy tale cottages always seem to sit at the edge of a dark wood, which is exactly where the trouble tends to start.
Hansel and Gretel
Hansel and Gretel didn't stumble on the candy house by luck. In the old story a snow-white bird sang so sweetly that they followed it through the woods, and it flew ahead and landed right on the roof.
Hansel and Gretel coloring pages
The Gingerbread Man
The Gingerbread Man first showed up in print in an American children's magazine in 1875. A little old woman baked him because she had no children of her own, but the moment she opened the oven door he hopped out and ran off, shouting "Run, run, as fast as you can..."
Little Red Ridinghood
In the Grimm version Grandma's house stood out in the woods, half an hour's walk from the village, under three big oak trees with hazel hedges all around. That's a long way to go with a basket, and it gave the wolf plenty of time to run on ahead...
Little Red Ridinghood coloring pages
Snow White and Rose Red
Two sisters lived with their mother in a little cottage with two rose bushes by the door, one white and one red, and the girls were named after them. One snowy night a bear knocked and asked to warm himself by their fire, and he turned out to be the best friend they ever had.
The Seven Dwarfs
Everything in the dwarfs' cottage came in sevens. There were seven little plates on the table and seven little beds in a row, and Snow White tried every one of them until the seventh fit just right...
The Three Little Pigs
In the old English story the third pig doesn't just hide in his brick house. He outsmarts the wolf again and again, and at the fair he even rolls down a hill inside a butter churn to scare him off.
Baba Yaga
Baba Yaga's hut stands deep in the Russian forest on a pair of chicken legs, and it turns around whenever it likes. To get in you have to ask it nicely: "Little hut, little hut, turn your back to the forest and your front to me..."
Abraham Lincoln's Log Cabin
Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809 in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky with a dirt floor. He grew up to be president of the United States, and the boy from the log cabin became a kind of American fairy tale...
Cabin
President's Day coloring pages
Legendary Places
Some of the most famous places in old stories aren't houses at all, but you'd still want to visit them.
Bifrost
The Norse said a rainbow bridge called Bifrost stretched from the world of people up to Asgard, home of the gods. A watchman named Heimdall guarded the far end, and his hearing was so sharp he could hear the grass growing.
Norse mythology coloring pages
Fairy Mound
Ireland is dotted with old grassy mounds, and for hundreds of years people believed the fairy folk lived inside them. Farmers ploughed carefully around them, and the stories warned that a single night of dancing inside could turn out to be a hundred years in the world outside...
Avalon
Avalon means something like "island of apples," and the old stories said its trees gave fruit all year round. Morgan le Fay ruled the island with her eight sisters, and she was such a gifted healer that King Arthur was carried there by boat after his last battle so she could tend his wounds.
Merlin's Crystal Cave
Under Tintagel Castle in Cornwall there's a real sea cave called Merlin's Cave. In some versions of the legend the wizard never died at all. The Lady of the Lake sealed him inside a cave of crystal, using a spell he'd taught her himself...
Delphi
The Greeks believed Delphi was the centre of the world. Zeus let two eagles fly from opposite ends of the earth, and they met right over this spot on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, where Apollo's temple and his oracle stood...
The Labyrinth
The labyrinth on the island of Crete was built by the clever inventor Daedalus, and it twisted so much that he could hardly find his own way out. The ruins of a huge palace at Knossos, full of winding halls, may be where the idea first came from...