Charlevoix the Beautiful™

Charlevoix was our first stop on the West Side of the Lower Michigan Peninsula. The Earl Young Mushroom Houses in Charlevoix were a surprise diversion from the weather so we took a tour with Terry.

I won’t do our tour guide justice with the full story of the Mushroom Houses but do remember that this was Earl Young’s mother’s house and part of the inspiration for his subsequent art. You can find more info at Wikipedia.

I do remember Terry remarked that this house was a “middle finger to the mayor”. There was a property line dispute, the mayor refused to budge so Earl went ahead and built half of the house he intended anyway…

The Thatch House. Many of the Mushroom Houses are available as vacation rentals. This is the largest and most expensive… $1000/night.

Earl used Frank Lloyd Wright’s trick of hiding the front door on his Mushroom houses.

Earl started this house and then lost it during the Depression. We saw a picture of the house with only the chimney and the standing arched stones around the window when the bank owned it. Earl got it back and completed it in the 1930’s.

In keeping with Earl’s aesthetics, the owners of this house maintained the “wrapped roofline” when they had to replace the roof. The original cedar shingles were steamed to create the round edges.

I thought this the most spectacular of the properties we saw. It is a rolling lake front lot where the house does not compete with the landscape but seems somehow a natural extension of it.

Earl designed even the fencing and the garden beds with his reverence for, and art with, stone. The undulating fence pattern was meant to evoke the Lake Michigan waves visible from the property.