In the Roaring ’20s, the 18,000-square-foot house on Detroit’s Boston Boulevard itself roared with activity. The clamor of children’s voices, the bustle of 17 live-in servants, and the lively conversation of guests in the ballroom animated the home.
There were also informal gatherings in the downstairs pub, the air choked with cigar smoke, while men talked robustly of business and finance amid the clack of billiard balls in an adjoining room. Sometimes the majestic Estey pipe organ in the foyer permeated the sprawling mansion with its stentorian notes.
Fifty years later, those sounds surrendered to silence. The lady of the house, then in her 90s, lived there quietly, her circle of servants narrowed considerably, the children grown, her husband dead since 1963. She maintained the home until her death in 1974.
Today, a different kind of noise is enlivening the home, which was built in 1922 for Charles and Sarah Fisher, of the “Body by Fisher” family. The rat-a-tat of hammers and the clang of plumbers’ wrenches punctuate the renovation taking place. Outside, landscapers are busy planting trees and bushes, while three stories up workers repair leaks to the slate roof.
Michael Fisher, a cousin to the Charles Fisher family, bought the house three years ago. He’s an old hand at renovating stately homes, having first purchased a house in 1993 on Seminole in Indian Village. Then, in 1997, he bought and refurbished the Italianate manor built for Benjamin Siegel (the founder of B. Siegel, the tony women’s shops) just east of the Fisher home. Even before he owned his present residence, Fisher says he was attracted to it. “I once was invited to a Halloween party here, and I walked in the front door. My cousin was with me, and I told him, ‘I’m going to own this house someday.’?”
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The dramatic foyer of the Charles T. Fisher mansion includes an English walnut stairway with carved lions and falcons. The floors are teak. The religious painting at left was a birthday gift to Michael Fisher from an antiques dealer friend. The chandelier is original to the house. The alcove at the top of the stairs served as Charles Fisher’s office. A DAUNTING PROJECTThat “someday” wasn’t just an elusive dream. But owning a house, no matter how fond one is of it, requires constant care. And with 48 rooms, the Fisher mansion demands more attention than a classroom of fidgety preschoolers. That’s why Fisher, director and owner of the Fisher Funeral Home in Redford Township, hired Drew Esslinger, an estate manager who runs the household with swift efficiency. The plan is to restore the manor as much as possible to the way it originally looked. That effort is aided in part by photographs of rooms taken in 1922 and blueprints from architect George D. Mason, who, four years later, would design Detroit’s Masonic Temple.
In just three years, progress has been steady.
“The front of the house was completely covered by pine trees and yews; you could barely see the house,” says Esslinger, who also lives in the house. “The entire front porch was caved in, so that was completely restored. Now we’re doing repairs to the roof and major plumbing work,” he says.
As evidence of the headway he’s making, Esslinger shows his visitor a recently renovated blower for the pipe organ.
It’s Esslinger’s task to track down expert craftspeople, and he doesn’t take rejection lightly.
“When people say, ‘Oh, we can’t renovate it; it has to be gutted,’ I say, ‘I’m sorry, but I know it can be done, and I’ll get someone else to do it if I have to search the country.’?”
Fisher estimates that it will take another five years before the home is completely restored, but, having already refurbished two old homes, he’s learned not to set precise timelines.
“When you have a house of this age and size, you may have your own plan, but the house ends up telling you what you’re going to do,” Fisher says. “You could say, ‘This year, I’m going to buy new rugs, paint this room, and do this or that,’ but maybe the boiler gives out. The house has its own agenda.”
To prove his point, Fisher mentions a bathroom (there are 17 in the house) on the third floor where a pipe sprang a leak. “We had to gut the walls out of the shower and replace it, and now we’re re-tiling it. It kind of throws my schedule off.”
Some might say that renovating a home of that scale is too expensive, too demanding, but Fisher sees it differently.
“Detroit cannot afford to lose one more piece of its history; it can’t afford to lose one more significant building. We’ve already lost too much.”
Though born in Detroit, Fisher grew up primarily in Fowlerville, but family stories about Detroit’s glory days intrigued him. “I heard how fantastic Hudson’s was, how great the streetcars were, and how crowded it was downtown,” he says in the sunroom on a mild October evening. “I always felt there was a part of me, long before my time, that was part of Detroit. I could just feel my essence was here.”
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At 18,000 square feet, the 1922 English Tudor-style Fisher manor on Boston Boulevard is the largest home in the Boston-Edison district. At night, it’s illuminated by six floodlights. Fresh landscaping replaced yews and trees that largely blocked the home from view.
A REMARKABLE HOME
Walking through the 12-bedroom (there are two more in the carriage house) Fisher dwelling, the largest home in the historic Boston-Edison district, leaves no doubt that it is, as Fisher says, “a significant building.” Among its many notable details: custom-made Pewabic tile floors in the sunroom and hallway; an English walnut staircase with finely carved lions and falcons; an elaborate marble fountain in the sunroom, a trompe l’oeil tapestry ceiling in the library that’s actually hand-stenciled wood; leaded-glass Art Deco-style doors on the first floor; two walk-in vaults and six safes (one used to store booze during Prohibition); an Art Deco-style pub in the basement; a marble-floored ballroom; and a chapel.
“The house was modeled after English countryside Tudors in the 16th through 18th centuries,” Esslinger says. “But there’s a lot of Art Deco and some Art Nouveau in the house, too. That was very typical architecturally of that time period.”
Fisher, the home’s fifth owner, has furnished it with family heirlooms, as well as antiques and furniture he finds at auctions, estate sales, and through the help of a dealer friend. Some pieces came from the Siegel home, including furniture, a painting by Detroit artist Myron Barlow, and a regal walnut grandfather clock on the landing that was a wedding gift to Benjamin and Sophie Siegel in the early 1900s.
Other acquisitions include a white-marble bust of Delphine Dodge that had originally been in Grosse Pointe’s Rose Terrace (the home of Horace and Anna Thomson Dodge), and an Art Deco light fixture in the sunroom that once hung in New York’s Chrysler Building.
In the 56 years that the Fishers lived there, relatively few renovations were made. The most significant was a kitchen remodeling by J.L. Hudson in 1947. The library was originally a billiards room, but Fisher says Sarah couldn’t abide the cigar smoke while Charles and his colleagues kicked back. “So she moved the billiards room to the basement, which had been a sitting room next to the ballroom. In the library, she installed a fireplace, which was imported from Europe.”
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