This handsome stone house in Grosse Pointe Park was designed by the esteemed Wallace Frost and shows his trademark flourishes. It’s a Tudor cottage style with bays, coves and arches. The interior is loaded with stone, fine woodwork and big casement windows for natural light.
Now it also has 21st Century high style — the work of its current owners Paul Corvino and Sarah Dash. They maintained the fine original, but styled it with sleek furniture from mid-century stars like Mies van der Rohe plus pieces that are contemporary today.
This house’s fun pedigree goes beyond Wallace Frost. This is the close-in part of the Grosse Pointes where Prohibition bootleggers would cross from Canada. This house and several of its neighbors all have basement speakeasies.
Frost designed two ways to get out of sight if a resident needed to do so quickly. One is a set of skinny curved stone steps. The other, hidden behind mahogany paneling, is sliding pole like a Batpole.
It still works. Corvino made a video that shows him sitting at his desk when an alarm sounds. He gets up quickly, crosses the room, checks behind him, then opens the mahogany panel. An open space with a pole appears; he jumps on it and disappears into the basement.
From many fine rooms, the most striking might be the garden room, an indoor-outdoor room with three large arches for its outside wall. These arches are supersized French doors, and behind them are arching French door screens. So you can open up this decorative wall for breezes and still be in a screened porch.
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The view from here is a large stone terrace and a beautiful deep lawn beyond that includes blossoming trees. The grounds feel even bigger than they are because next door neighbors keep theirs wide open.
The address is on East Jefferson. But the orientation doesn’t feel citified because the house faces into a cluster of 1920s mansions approached by private streets.
A truly original room here is the beautiful library or office, paneled in carved mahogany, the hiding place for the Batpole.
Of eight bathrooms, one looks new. The other seven are the original art tile, some with amazing designs. Every guest room has a vintage bath. Next to every original tub and shower, Corvino put a see-through glass shield to eliminate blousy shower curtains.
The couple combined three bedrooms to make a stunning owners’ suite. Besides the large sleeping room, it has his-and-her baths, a large sitting room that holds “his” closets and a large dressing room that includes “hers.”
These owners did not redo the kitchen, but a previous owner did. It’s handsome and certainly much larger than Frost’s famously small kitchens.
There’s a third floor here that had been servants’ quarters with a kitchen and a bath. Corvino’s adult kids use it when they visit.
The couple plan to move to a three-bedroom condo, so they won’t take much of their bigscale vintage furniture. Some of that will be for sale separately from the house.
Other assets of the house include a private entrance and long private drive, garage space for four cars. The pair keep the basement speakeasy mostly original and use it as a party room, theater and man cave.
The roof is original slate. The many casement windows have all been replaced with windows styled to be the same.
This house is close to Lake St. Clair, but not smack on the water. In 1916-27 Frost designed two houses on this deep piece of land for the industrialist brothers Edgar and J.P. Bower.
The brothers flipped a coin to decide who got the water. J.P. won. This is Edgar’s house, as marked by a brass plaque by the door.
Prohibition house
Where: 16632 East Jefferson, Grosse Pointe Park
How much: $1,399,000
Bedrooms: 7 Baths: 6 full, 2 half
Square feet: 8,140
Key features: Beautiful stone house by architect Wallace Frost is in very good condition, recently refurbished but not altered architecturally. Large, lovely grounds, close to downtown Detroit.
Contact: Dino Ricci, Sine & Monaghan Realtors, 313-460-2225.
A note about photos
In order to limit our staff's exposure to coronavirus, the Detroit Free Press is temporarily suspending its practice of using our photographers to capture images for House Envy and is instead using photographs prepared by listing Realtors, with credit to the photographers. We thank the Realtors for helping in this effort.
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GPP house with 1920s speakeasy was built when bootleggers crossed from Canada - Detroit Free Press
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