Menkemaborg began as a fourteenth-century stone house. In 1701, Unico Allard Alberda and Everdina Cornera van Berum commissioned a major renovation; architect Allert Meijer gave the house a symmetrical Baroque layout.
The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rooms contain furniture, silver, porcelain and portraits. Surviving features include a state bed in yellow Chinese silk damask, woodcarving by Jan de Rijk and mythological paintings by Hermannus Collenius.