CHARLEVOIX, Mich.— “Excuse me, do you live here?”
I’m walking along a paved path in a tiny town that barely feels real. To my left, Lake Michigan is so intensely turquoise it’s ethereal. To my right, the stone, storybook houses lining Park Avenue are straight out of “The Smurfs.”
The woman asks the question shyly, her wide eyes indicating that she, too, is unsure what to make of this magical place.
I look around, deciding whether I should let her in on my secret: that I’m staying in one of the “mushroom houses” designed by a Charlevoix man named Earl Young. For days, I’ve watched an unending parade of people mosey by my windows on foot, in vehicles and on tours snapping photos. On a typical summer day, I’ve been told, 200 to 300 people might flock to this peaceful, tree-lined street in the Earl Young Local Historic District.
“I’m renting one of the houses,” I stage-whisper.
I point past a cartoonlike hobbit cottage, beyond the mammoth mushroom house with its undulating thatched roof, to the place where I’m calling home for three nights: a curvy dwelling that looks like it’s stacked with slices of light-colored stone and topped with a roof of shingles that appear to have been scattered by a child. It’s perched atop a knoll that slopes as gently as the structure itself.
“You can do that?” I see in her eyes that she’s already planning to.
We chat for a minute; her name is Kim Wright, and she and her husband traveled here from Cottage Grove, Minnesota. “We were passing through Charlevoix, and we were going to go down to the beach, and then we looked up the street and saw that mushroom house,” she says. “It looks like a fairy tale.”
I tell her I had the same experience 11 years ago when I rode through Charlevoix on a bike. I bought a book called “Mushroom Houses of Charlevoix” and vowed I would return. Earlier this year, I remembered that promise. After searching for “mushroom houses” on a couple of vacation rental platforms, I booked Young’s former residence. Then I went down the rabbit hole.
Guided by nature
Young, who was born in 1889, moved to Charlevoix as a child, and the town with its three lakes spoke to his soul. Books about him talk about how he became transfixed by the boulders he saw along the shores of Lake Michigan and beyond. He collected them, stashing away his favorites with the intention to one day become an architect and incorporate them into his homes.
Formal training wasn’t for him, however. According to David Miles, author of “Boulders: The Life and Creations of Earl A. Young in Charlevoix, Michigan,” he lasted just a year in the University of Michigan’s architecture program, uninterested in learning about classical design, with its pillars, columns and symmetry.
“He was inspired by nothing more than Mother Nature,” Miles says. “He could put an image of his stones in his mind, and whirl them around, and all of a sudden they’d be a wall.”
Beginning around 1918, Young went on to do just that. Across 50-some years, he completed 26 stony residences and four commercial properties, including two hotels, each designed to blend in organically with its surroundings. All but one are in Charlevoix; he built the outlier home for a client in Alma, Michigan, according to “Boulders.”
Along the way, Young became famous for his intuitive approach to design. “He never drew a blueprint. He never drew a floor plan. He never drew an elevation,” says Miles, who is the curator at the local museum, run by the Charlevoix Historical Society.
Instead, he’d sit with his wife, Irene, at the dinner table, and she’d ask what he was going to do tomorrow, Miles says. He’d pick up a piece of scrap paper, make sketches and shove them in his pocket. Irene, who was an artist, would then make sketches of her own. “The story was that she would get up in the morning before Earl did and take what she had drawn down to the site, to the foreman of the crew, and show them what he had been talking about the night before so that they might have an idea of what he was going to be talking about when he got there,” Miles says. “Which sometimes didn’t happen, because he had a dream the night before and everything changed.”
From the earliest days, word got around about the whimsical designs, and visitors came to see the homes for themselves, Miles says. However, the first tour of the homes wasn’t until 2004, by Miles’s count. That’s when a representative from the local chamber of commerce called Miles and asked for help: She had a bus full of visitors and time to fill before dinner at the Weathervane, a restaurant Young designed.
“I thought, one thing I have to show these people is the mushroom houses,” Miles says. “Word got out, and I did four more tours that summer.”
Touring the mushroom houses
Today, the pilgrims keep coming to the small town of “Charlevoix the Beautiful,” population 2,348 as of the last census. Self-guided tour maps are available through Visit Charlevoix, or you can do what I did and book a seat in an electric cart with Mushroom House Tours. I was thrilled to learn my tour guide was Sharon Smithem, who illustrated the children’s book “Mushroom House Man: The Story of Earl A. Young and his Cottages of Stone,” which a friend had just gifted me.
On a Tuesday morning, Smithem drives five of us — from Chicago (me); Boyne City, Michigan; and Florida — past 20-some stone cottages and chalets built for the likes of Snow White and the dwarfs. She points out hidden doors, rounded windows and uneven, cedar-shake roofs. In a front yard, we see a grill made of stones, and in a backyard, a playhouse made of rocks. The Owl House, a favorite, has windows that look like wizened eyes. We learn that one called the Thatch House, which looks like the megalodon of mushrooms, has been altered. This was Young’s first house, dating back more than a century. Much, much later, a home buyer decided to out-Young Young with the dramatic mushroom roof, and today, Smithem says the medieval-looking mansion is the most photographed home of them all.
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