Golden Gate Villa, Queen Anne style mansion in Santa Cruz, United States.

The Golden Gate Villa is a three-story mansion on 3rd Street featuring developed basements, an attic, and three distinctive towers rising prominently into the skyline. The building displays classic Queen Anne architectural elements with intricate facade patterns and varying roof forms that define its exterior.

The Golden Gate Villa was built in 1891 for Major Frank McLaughlin, a mining engineer and California politician, to designs by San Francisco architect Thomas J. Welsh. Its guests included Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Edison. In the 1940s it operated as a restaurant, the Palais Monte Carlo, and on July 24, 1975 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

The house is named after the Golden Gate, the strait by San Francisco where its architect Thomas J. Welsh practised; the name was carried south to Santa Cruz. Its Queen Anne form, with towers and varied rooflines, was the fashion for wealthy Californians in 1891. Later owners included screenwriter Dorothy Kingsley, who with her husband William W. Durney bought it in 1963.

The location is easily accessible on foot and sits centrally in town, where the building is visible from the street. Visitors can admire the architecture from outside and explore the surroundings to get a sense of the historic neighborhood.

During the 1940s, the villa was converted into a restaurant called Palais Monte Carlo. This phase as a dining establishment shows how the building adapted to meet the needs of the era before returning to private residential use.