Tasteful Friends- A Darling Little Detroit Villa

Very nice

if you want to live in Detroit

Huge industrialist mansion designed mostly with very little finesse. The grand staircase is so clumsy. I love this kind of folly. I would have enjoyed squatting a house like this with a bunch of other young bohemians and punks. I hope nobody tears it down. It should be a group home or school or daycare of some kind. Detroit should try to preserve more of its former glory.

I can understand the owners wanting to take the original dining room chandelier

but seriously, this looks as if they took and left a bare light bulb in its place...

Could the realtor maybe advise them they need to replace it with a comparable light fixture

Hard to believe that Detroit had a "Gilded Age", but here's a prime example who's time has unfortunately come and gone

Well, it looks secure

Beautiful, love it! I wouldn't change much, except for adding some color to the walls and then bring in my furniture and whatever unique pieces I could find at fleemarkets, garage sales and second hand stores.

Was it a consulate?

If this house were to be abandoned, it could withstand decades of neglect simply because of the quality of the construction, quality that does not exist in today's Tyvek-and-particle-board McMansions.

It's amazing that cities like Detroit and Buffalo still have their grand old mansions. Cities like New York and Chicago lost all of theirs to progress

Such is the upside of never experiencing progress. I live in Pittsburgh, I should know.

Wow, what a treasure. If only they could move it lock, stock, & barrel to a decent place.

It's in the Indian Village neighborhood (the streets are named for different tribes) which has been making comeback. The mayor's residence is nearby. It seems a little institutional to me and would seem to have more promise for that than the private residence, although a couple of old queens could probably make a decent profit here with some skill and imagination. Detroit's inner areas have been making quite a comeback of the last couple decades and there's some very good housing stock there.

It looks like this building was slated for demolition a few years ago. I wonder why it wasn't taken down.

^ Perhaps Detroit has a historical preservation group who blocked demolition

Those bathrooms look so ice cold. What a place to have to sit first thing in the morning. Yikes!

but they would be heaven during a hot summer with no air conditioning. As would the entire house.

The thing poor Bohemians do in such cavernous spaces is build warm spaces inside big rooms. But yeah you can't do that in the John. Maybe a wood burning stove in one of the johns!

I really see this best used by modest people. Yeah not squatters. But by people who could appreciate some solidity and feel nice to have such a grand room to live in.

R16 = Marianne Williamson

The only demolition I could find was when the current owner got rid of the details added when this became an office building, like covering over windows. The owner bought it on a land contract (you miss a payment, you lose your house), so it was very speculative when she bought it. The Detroit Institute of Art apparently helped advise the restoration work.

You can buy a good chunk of Detroit for the same price of that one house.

It's spectacular, but does look like it would work better as commercial or government offices. It's on a busy road that looks very commercial. Other grand houses around it.

The kitchen needs help. It would need A/C; an expensive proposition. All the metal grates on the windows would have to go, as well as repairing the damage caused by their installation.

And you'd REALLY want to live in Detroit to spend $3.5M.