Tasteful Friends—A near perfect home on Mackinac Island

I love it. You can probably on use it 3 months out of the year.

I’d love to scroll through the images, but that horrible “liking this home?” thing comes up and freezes the scroll through.

The maintenance on that has to be huge.

The island has a year-round population of 583.

The idea of living on even the best island in Michigan is depressing, but the house is quite attractive outside and gas some nice interiors - the one big negative being the low ceiling heights.

$5M will buy a nice house is most places on the world. It should buy a truly superlative, better than Newport summer house on Mackinak Island -- and with some high ceilings, ffs.

The former stables looks interesting and much of the landscaping is good.

It could be nice but every room is a testosterone sucking nightmare. Men will wither in this house within hours. No sex will ever be had.

I like the house next door which has covered exterior porches on the 2nd and 3rd floors.

Love the house and love Mackinac Island, OP. That area brings great nostalgia of our family vacations there in the late 1970s.

R8 is it true that full time residents had cars that they kept hidden until after all the tourists went home at night?

The overwrought writing in the listing raises more questions than answers. A house where no doors need be open or shut? What? Tell me how old the roof is or something practical.

[quote]Tell me how old the roof is or something practical.

People rarely buy expensive historic houses rich with period details because "the roof was replaced 18 months ago."

That's a selling point in the listing details only for a house with which there any more very similar houses on the market.

But yeah, the listing is florid about lifestyle and short on facts.

Wow, just wow OP, when you said a "near perfect home" I wasnt expecting it to be this good. It really is damn near perfect, and that lounge is just so fucking cool.

I really cant think of anything I'd change except maybe the location, the low ceilings are a minus but when everything else is so good I'd cope

I've saved this to my dream homes folder for reference for ideas for my own place.

R10 yes I would want to know how recently the roof has been done, but as R11 says, if you were looking for just this sort of house you'd be jumping in anyway and use practical details like that as points to negotiate on when making offers

It’s not the Keweenaw. That place is out there too but you aren’t on a small island without cars.

It takes a special kind of person to ensure that the bedsheets have the same print on them as the wallpaper.

Encroached on by the rubble piles around it?

Fuck that shit. It's also a folly in its design. Ugh.

I like the exterior. The interior is givng me a headache

Why no info on the size of the lot?

There are no cars which is very nice. It's a beautiful island, nautical and kind of wild forest at the same time, but you always get that freshwater 'pond smell'. Nobody ever swims or speaks of swimming.

It's a great for a week; it's a very small island.

What a perfectly scrumptious little summer cottage! I'll take it.

R12- I like the fact that the kitchen is quite restrained and some FRAU with very average taste did not get her paws on it to McMansionize it.

The interior design leaves a lot to be desired, but the bones of the house and it's high level of artisan detail are very appealing. And that view! Of course the drawbacks would be the ridiculously high cost of maintenance, and for $5M I would like just a smidge more elbow room. Looks almost as if you could lean out the window and borrow a cup of sugar yourself.

If you don’t own acreage that separates you from other homes, you’re living without the most valuable things on earth — privacy and silence.

Mackinac is abundant in both R22

The island is dead silent 9 months of the year.

I can almost smell the fudge and the horse shit! Not to mention the fug of thousands of fat, ugly tourists in the summer.

The kitchen has a bad layout. The sink is far from the stove. The refrigerator is in an adjacent room.

It must be freezing there in the winter

If it has 10 bathrooms and the only one they showed is that tiny one with a cramped corner shower stall I'm guessing the others aren't much either.

yikes

Big projects, big visions, big names. This gal is gonna have it! Eds, we can do this! Let’s do America! Mack-IN-ACK Island it is!

The wallpaper scheme is INTENSE but I'm in love with all the 70's touches, especially the kitchen and the old stables. More yellow!!

Stuffy.

That’s a lot of money for the middle of nowhere.

I had some fun on Mackinac Island with Jane Seymour.

The tall row of carefully clipped evergreens in front is tasteless and spoils the design of the front of the house.

Great view of the bridge in one pic.

Is that a bridge to the north (upper peninsula) or to the south? Or is there one bridge to both?

[quote]I had some fun on Mackinac Island with Jane Seymour.—Ghost of Christopher Reeve

Beautiful place.

No date of build? That’s the first thing I look for.

For some reason I don’t cotton to it.

Does anyone remember Tricia Guild and the Designers Guild from the nineties? That's what this home reminds me over. Horribly overdecorated and fucking awful.

Beautiful exterior, far too ornate iinside.

And it’s only a few doors down from the Grand Hotel.

[quote]No date of build? That’s the first thing I look for.

1888 (which seems right) per other sources, R42. And agreed, I always filter by date if possible, in my case because I like only old houses.

You can’t drive on the island or maybe you can when the tourists leave.

Do they have a Costco on the island? I have my broker ready to move on this one as soon as we can answer the Costco question.

I spent part of a summer in that area, and it was creepy and conservative filled with weird Christian “retreats” and camps. I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.

[quote] Or is there one bridge to both?

It links the UP with the lower part of the state/the hand.

R44 Cars aren't allowed year round.

The views are spectacular but other than that I kind of hate it? I hate the decor, I hate Victorian homes. But Mackinac Island is very special. For a weekend though. If I had $5 million to spend on a summer home I would be somewhere in California or Hawaii.

* Michigan does have a lot of beautiful places but outside the blighted cities it is basically Cold Oklahoma

Didn’t care for the house architecture or the interior. The only room I came close to liking was the kitchen. It’s just my style.

[quote]10 bathrooms...

So, at a sawbuck per poop, how many tourists will it take to break even if you're open from 7a.m. to 9p.m.?

The interior reminds me of a funeral home. All that carpet and those upholstered chairs. And the island has two settings - overrun with tourists and so dead you want to slit your throat. Hard pass.

That house is useless in that location at that price.

Why do you Americans have so many bathrooms? More bathrooms than bedrooms? Why??

What is the circular pointy roof called? The other house has it too is it a zoning requirement? The pointy roof is kind of creepy. R55 haha I don’t know… frank Lloyd wright has died so the secret remains haha. At least my house has 2 br and 2 bathrooms. I had a contractor build it. My neighbor has one of those haunted house style houses and it has 3 stories, more bathrooms than bedrooms and a pointy roof. They painted it bright blue, it was visual pollution. Thankfully someone else bought it and changed the paint to grey.

What has "frank Lloyd wright" got to do with this house, Rose?

[quote]Cars aren't allowed year round.

Bitch, please.

I worked as a bartender on Mackinac one summer during college. The rich guys from the houses in the bluff would come in during the day and complain about the sailboat docking fees, their wives, their children. I was 21 and would pretend to care. Bad tippers. Then the Native American guys with knife scars on their faces who did the cartage on the island would come in ask about my day and tip generously.

R55 because if it can be avoided, we would prefer guests to use a guest bathroom rather than the families. We know everyone takes a peak in the medicine cabinets and such. A simple powder room downstairs makes everyone’s life easier with guests and for the family.

Family’s*

R60 I'm alright with 2-3 bathrooms. But why would anyone need 10+?

R60, I believe houses should have a number of bathrooms equal to the number of bedrooms plus one. That way, each bedroom has its own bath (no sharing with someone you're not sleeping with), preferably en suite, plus a powder room for guests who aren't spending the night.

No cars and only accessible by ferry. For the right person, it could be heaven.

That house has no AC. The Earth is warming, you don't want to be stuck sweating your ass off in the summer. Window units on a $4 million dollar victorian is tacky. So it'd be a very hard pass.

It seems like it would be wonderful boutique hotel or B&B. Too much house for one person or even a family. I love it. Reminds me of Somewhere in Time.

Average summer temperatures on Mackinac Island rarely rise above 75 and I can imagine the nights are cool.

You cannot swim at all. The water is so cold it will kill you if you touch it.

For 4 million I would much rather be in Harbor Springs.

You should come to my lake house!

4 million bucks? Get a little villa on a large clean swimmable temperature lake in a good town with things to do and people to meet. Lake Geneva (Leman) France/Switzerland, Lake Annecy France or Lake Garda Italy.

r67 that's well in good, but year after year, places with comfortable average summer temps are seeing hotter and hotter summers. PNW where many felt there was no need for AC experienced a heat weave the last two years in a row. The UK, France, etc also had a terrible heatwave last summer.

As I said, the Earth is presenting warmer and warmer summers in our neck of the woods. Saddling yourself with an old pile of bricks to precious to be updated with AC (bc it's probably a historic landmark) is a recipe for discomfort and complicated sale opportunities down the line.

Of course, if you are an ancient elder gay, basic DL member, you may only have 10 more years to sweat out your summers so it's of no concern. But anyone looking at this as a longterm owner would be a fool to get uncomfortable money pit.

R72: FFS, do you think all historic buildings are forced to do without air conditioning? Maybe they are not allowed to park cars in the "carriage house," only horses and buggies? Or maybe they must agree to dress in historical garb and house tours on the half hour?

There's nothing to prevent adding central air conditioning to the house. The worst restriction that might application is the location of the external condensers and other equipment, perhaps tp hide it behind a lattice screen if on the principal facade. A/C is absolutely commonplace in landmarked buildings.

And if the temperatures are fine now and probably the next 10 years, you'd be a fool to install a system preemptively that, in 10 years, might be on the edge of obsolescence and inefficiency - a/c technology evolved rapidly to achieve comforts at higher levels of environmental compliance.

This was a place people went before airplanes. You can fly to the coast now.

[quote]That house has no AC. The Earth is warming, you don't want to be stuck sweating your ass off in the summer. Window units on a $4 million dollar victorian is tacky. So it'd be a very hard pass.

R65 I agree that window units would be tacky - but as R73 quite rightly points out there are now much better alternatives that can be retrofitted to historic homes - ducted AC systems that duct cool air to all parts of the house that need it with an outdoor unit either up on the roof or concealed around the back somewhere discreetly behind a hedge or lattice screen. And there are also floorstanding heatpump indoor units that can either go in fireplaces or be concealed behind curtains or furniture - an ornate, overstuffed Victorian home is actually at an advantage here as it present a myriad of opportunities to conceal modern tech

R36 the bridge is between the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan. There is no bridge to Mackinac Island, only ferries that go to both the upper and lower peninsulas.

R56 A turret

Frank Lloyd Wright's entire career was the antithesis of this style, R56

Had he seen this place, he'd have run from it.

Rhoda Morgenstern lived in a turret.

R78 you are almost entirely correct. But FLW did use a turret in an early work.

R69 Now, that's a beautiful house. Minus the Fred Flintstone fireplace. And the head of a dead animal on the wall. And the midlife crisis sports car in the garage. And this extremely narrow staircase. Seriously, what the hell is this?

The Michigan Governor's Summer Residence on Mackinac Island looks like a boarding house.

It's perfect in every way. Right down to each blade of grass.

The Governors house is on a large scale and very nice. Yeah the exterior isn't a showy. But look at the proportions of the rooms, and the ceiling heights.

R83 Huh?

"Meeting ships arriving at dock conjures images of exotic foods, gifts, visitors, and packages from afar." LOL