Collection by William Lamb
Michigan Modern: 7 Homes in the Great Lake State
Home to Herman Miller, Michigan has a long and storied modernist pedigree. Here are seven inventive or noteworthy Michigan houses from Dwell's archives.
Built on a challenging hillside site and tucked behind a thicket of trees, the Bridgman, Michigan, house designed by Scott Rappe provides a modern weekend retreat for a Chicago couple. “One of my first responsibilities was getting the owners up to their house and essentially on one level. Because of the pie-shaped property, we needed to push the building up the hill to provide square footage for the program. By keeping the building perpendicular to the slope, using piloti on one side and a retaining wall on the dune side, we were able to insert foundations with minimal disturbance," says Rappe.
Architect Jim Garrison of Brooklyn-based Garrison Architects was asked to design a lakeside retreat for visiting families at a boarding school for troubled teens, Star Commonwealth, in Albion, Michigan. To drastically reduce academic interruption and cut site noise, Garrison decided early on to create an 1,100-square-foot modular building dubbed Koby, with two bedrooms on opposite sides of the structure and a common dining area in the middle “as a therapeutic space for families to gather and eat together.”
Dow Chemical put Midland on the map, but architect and local scion Alden B. Dow made it the most modern town in Michigan. Dow’s masterpiece is undoubtedly his home and studio in Midland. Designed in 1933 to be built in stages, the sprawling manse seems to rise out of a pond, its green copper roof and bright-white, geometric form seemingly birthed by the landscape. It’s a nearly perfect evocation of a guiding Dow dictum, “Gardens never end, and buildings never begin.”