Cranbrook House & Gardens
Hello, this is Danielle Harris, delighted you are joining me again as we DISCOVER DETROIT. Today our destination is CRANBROOK HOUSE located at 380 Lone Pine Road in Bloomfield Hills.
It was built for George Booth (1864-1949), a Toronto native who owned a successful ironworks in Windsor, and his wife Ellen Scripps Booth (1863-1948). Ellen was the eldest child of James Edmund Scripps, founder of the Detroit Evening News, today’s Detroit News. Married in 1887, they lived and raised their five children in a home built for them on Trumbull Avenue.
In 1888 George joined the executive staff of the Scripps Family’s publishing empire, working with his father-in-law to build the Evening News into Detroit’s largest daily, a process they repeated at other Scripps-owned newspapers throughout the Midwest.
At the same time George privately began buying interests in several other Michigan papers. Soon-after he formed a partnership with his brothers Ralph and Edmund (who had their own newspapers), and established the Booth Publishing Company, which became the largest and most profitable chain in Michigan history.
Desiring the gracious life of a country gentlemen and an estate larger than anything possible in Detroit, in 1904 George and Ellen purchased a 174-acre run-down farm in Bloomfield Hills. They named it Cranbrook, after George’s family’s ancestral home.
They immediately began changing the property – grading hills, creating small lakes, and started a massive landscaping plan to cover the then barren terrain. They also laid roads supporting both the changing landscape and the home they now envisioned. During these early years they spent summers only at the farmhouse on Cranbrook. Their primary residence remained 605 Trumbull.
James Scripps died in 1906, which prompted a full-scale move to Bloomfield. Their Trumbull home was sold to the Scripps estate, combined with other Scripps property, and donated to the Detroit Public Library. George then asked his long-time friend Albert Kahn to prepare working drawings for their future home. Kahn designed an English Arts and Crafts mansion, which George and Ellen moved to in 1907, just before celebrating their twenty-first anniversary. They were the first immensely wealthy family to make Bloomfield Hills their year-round home.
Although comfortable, the home was far from complete. Over the next decade and a half the house was substantially enlarged. Secondary buildings were added as well as large terraces from which they could enjoy their ever-expanding magnificent gardens.
George was both a patron and spokesperson of the Arts and Crafts movement. As such, he personally designed tapestries as well as much of the hand-carved wood paneling (some enhanced with custom-made Pewabic Pottery tile inserts), staircases and mantels. He even commissioned some stained-glass windows. Master craftsmen, many of them brought over from Europe, crafted this magnificence. Old masters’ paintings graced the walls, while the library was filled with rich leather-bound books.
Leonard Bernstein composed parts of his second symphony on the house’s Steinway grand while staying there in April, 1946, during his engagement to conduct the Detroit Symphony Orchestra at Orchestra Hall (now, after a massive refurbishing, part of the Max and Marjorie Fisher Music Center).
This stunning manor is surrounded by forty acres devoted to fifteen gardens, where something is always in season. There are the Sunken Garden, the Formal Garden, the Herb Garden, the Bog Garden, the Wildflower Garden, the Butterfly Garden, the the Japanese Garden, with its red bridge spanning a mini cascade, to mention a few. Carl Milles’s marvelous sculptures and fountains abound, along with specimen trees, a small lake, and Pewabic Pottery’s Rainbow Fountain (near the Japanese Garden).
The Cranbook House and its glorious gardens are a testament to Booth’s belief that “a life without beauty is only half-lived.” Believing that their country estate should be shared with and dedicated to the betterment of the public, after 1922 they began planning and building six institutions which would become the Cranbrook Educational Community. [These are the Brookside School for children, Kingswood School for young ladies, Cranbrook School for boys, Cranbrook Institute of Science, Cranbrook Academy of Art with its attached museum, and Christ Church Cranbrook.] In 1944 they created the Cranbrook Foundation to which they donated their home and its priceless furnishings, along with all of its acreage. They lived the final years of their life at Cranbrook House not as owners, but rather as caretakers of a living trust.
The house and its gardens remain the centerpiece of the Community. The first floor of the Booth’s home with its numerous architectural treasures and stunning furnishings, along with the spectacular gardens remain preserved as a testament to the Booth’s gracious lifestyle. The rest of the house contains the executive offices of the Cranbrook Educational Community, which will have its own article at a later date.
Cranbrook House and Gardens offers docent led tours (75 minutes - $20) June through October.
Reservations are required - Google Cranbrook, and click on Cranbrook House and Gardens Tours.
It is recommended that you arrive 15-20 minutes in advance as tours start promptly, and the doors are locked once they begin. Free self-guided tours of the gardens are permitted 7 a.m. –
7 p.m. mid-March through September and 8 a.m. – 5 p.m. October through mid-March.
