Quick answer
Emerald Bay sits at the southwest end of Lake Tahoe, carved out by glaciers and holding the lake's only island, Fannette Island. On top of that island stands the shell of a stone tea house built for Lora Josephine Knight, whose Scandinavian manor Vikingsholm was completed in 1929 and is now owned and run by California State Parks.
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The Island
Emerald Bay is the most photographed pocket of Lake Tahoe, and the reason sits out in the water: a forested hump of granite called Fannette Island, the only island in the entire lake. Glaciers did the rest, grinding down the whole valley until only this one rib of rock was left, standing 150 feet above the water. The name shifted for a hundred years, from Coquette to Baranoff to Dead Man's Island before Fannette stuck. Stand at the Emerald Bay lookout and let your eyes rest on it for a minute, because every other view in this stop is downstream of that one rock.
The Tea House
In 1928 a Chicago widow named Lora Josephine Knight bought the head of the bay for two hundred fifty thousand dollars and hired her nephew by marriage, the Swedish architect Lennart Palme, to raise a Scandinavian manor. The stranger project was the one across the water. On the island she had Palme build a miniature stone castle, sixteen feet square, with a fireplace and one oak table, where guests were ferried by motorboat for afternoon tea. Only the stone shell survives today, gutted by vandals years ago. Face the island and read what is left like a ruin, or climb to the top when the island is reachable by kayak.
Vikingsholm
The manor itself was finished in the fall of 1929, a blend of Norwegian stave churches and Swedish stone castles drawn from the tour Palme and Knight took through Scandinavia the summer before. More than two hundred workmen were housed in barracks on the property through that one builder's season, hewing timbers and carving the woodwork by hand. It is often called the finest example of Scandinavian architecture in the United States. The state of California took ownership in 1953, and the steep trail down from the Highway 89 lookout now delivers you straight to its sheltered cove. Walk down that trail — the climb back up is the price, and it clears the head.