A couple of other great Tudor revival houses that are absolutely worth touring are Meadowbrook Hall, built by the widow of one of the Dodge brothers, and the Eleanor and Edsel Ford house. They are both in the Detroit metropolitan area.
Great house! Me and my wife toured the beautiful Tudor home in 1995 (part of our 10th wedding anniversary road trip!) . Thanks for sharing Brent! I'm really learning a lot from your channel and website
I really love this house as well as the steel structure that holds everything together. Wasn't that an innovation for the time?? My favorite house is Meadowbrook Hall in Auburn Hills. Tudor is my favorite style!
Thank you for another inspiring video. I struggle with the details on my "cottage" style Tudor as opposed to one more formal. Especially due to factors such as cost and later resale desirability. I refuse to rip out interior walls to create an "open floor plan" or 'homogenize' the interior to suit modern trends. There will be at least one beamed ceiling, paneled library walls and stairway with pierced, carved handrail feature and leaded glass gable-end window. One custom built exterior door designed to resemble an English pub door or call box. Man I love this stuff! Thanks again.
I'm European origin, lived in US 20 years... I see so many "fake" euro houses in the states which can often be a bit tacky. This is amazing - it really looks like it was built 300 years ago in the UK. Amazing. Really haven't seen anything this authentic. Thanks for sharing Brent.
I've lived in the Cuyahoga Valley area most of my life and visited Stan Hywet several times over the years. It never fails to impress me, truly one of the areas most beautiful homes.
This house would be tens of millions in today’s money to replicate. Couldn’t even imagine the final tally. I can only see selected details being added to a modern design due to affordability and also yielding cleaner design.
In line with other comments, another excellent video. I think that the whole idea behind your videos - to raise the quality of the thinking that goes into designing and building houses - is absolutely what is needed; certainly in the UK. Yes, there are impressive homes being built but in the majority of them, the underlying design is reasonable facade for kerb appeal but the rest is as cheap as possible. I don’t know if the UK series Grand Designs is available in the US; if it is, it’s required viewing. I wouldn’t want to live in some of the buildings featured but that’s not the point for me. It’s to see why something works; why something doesn’t work and take on board the lessons that come out. And I’m never going to build or convert another house. I would love to see this house; your video, of necessity, is far too brief to really take it in. It certainly could be taken as a very high class house in the Tudor style over here. I don’t know how intentional it was, but I like the outside appearance of it in that it could be taken as an original central building with wings added later - they are certainly different in window and glass style. I know that it was never intended to be mistaken for an original Tudor house and so, there are bound to be elements that would not appear (in my experience) in original Tudor. I don’t think I have ever seen dormer windows in a Tudor house; they certainly would be allowed in any Tudor listed house; the bricks appear too large in their height with Tudor bricks usually smaller in height; inside, the timber framing is too perfect in that original Tudor houses used whatever timber was available and, inevitably, you don’t get many bookmatched oak trees. The foresters of that period did used to train oak trees to grow with a curve. They, themselves, would not the benefit of this but their sons and grandsons would. Cut oak with the curve required for vaulted ceilings but most of for ships hulls was very prized and commanded a higher price per board foot (I’m not sure they actually used that as a measurement) than straight trunks. Inevitably, the timber frames were not mirror images front to back or right to left; whatever timber that was good enough (and not used in ship building which had the priority call on oak in Tudor times) had to be used. It was also used green. As anyone who has used green oak, it shakes and moves. That movement would be seen over the next 10 to 40 years and the frame becomes even more uneven. The story of chimneys is worth a video into own right. In Elizabethan and early Stuart times (ie later than Henry VIII) it was a sign a sign of prestige to have brick chimneys. First of all, having several chimneys showed that you had several hearths in several different rooms as opposed to the historic one fire in the centre of the great hall. Secondly, using bricks almost lavishly was a sign of great wealth. Bricks were expensive and bricklaying not common (finally how, 1500 years ago, the Romans left brick structures in England but it took that time to rediscover the art of making and laying). The richest of the rich (an intended pun as one of the biggest scoundrels of the time was called Rich) wanted octagonal chimneys and even this evolved (mainly in Stuart times I believe) into helical curves (imagine the so-called spiral staircase in shape). The main material used for rain gutters (apart of wood on its own) and for hoppers etc. was lead. My guess is that the hoppers on this house were cast iron. It took a long time for people to understand that ingesting lead or lead fumes was eventually seriously bad for health; even then, the use of lead was retained for a long, long time in industries run by unscrupulous barons; in the hat making industry, madness through long term ingestion of lead was so common that it coined the phrase “mad as a hatter”. The windows are fascinating; I would totally agree that the size of each pane was governed by the abilities to produce large panes and that imperfections on the glass had to be accepted (notwithstanding that, how incredible it must have been to Tudors to have glass windows; to be able to look through them to the outside without feeling the elements). I must admit that I don’t think that I have never seen original truly coloured panes unless it’s in a stained glass window. I have seen one window where they probably incorporated some Roman glass (usually a form of jade green) and certainly some where the owners arms appear painted on some windows. This is no criticism at all of this house as it couldn’t pretend to be genuine Tudor. What I think has worked is that someone has admired aspects of Tudor and Stuart building styles and chosen to incorporate them into a “new” house.
Thanks for the suggestion for Grand design, I'll check it out. I think the house is excellent example of Tudor Revival architecture in America. As such, it copies and borrows from English traditions but is no way intended to be a copy. Instead it is an Americanized Tudor home. These are common in the 20's and 30's here and I find Stan Hywett to be a high bar that should be a goal for new Tudor houses today.
@@BrentHull Grand Designs has been going here for maybe 7 or 8 years. There are clips readily available on YT. Of course, the story of an innovative build has to be sensationalised to make what some people think is good TV. But there is a reasonable blend of great thinking/blind stupidity/budget optimism. The host has always been Kevin McLoud; again, nothing is every quite good or not quite good - it’s always superb or dreadful. Another UK show that I always enjoyed was House Detectives. A panel of real experts take an old house and one would look at the human history associated with it, whilst another looked at the building history. Perhaps a little serious for most of the UK TV audience. I don’t know if anyone over there knows a lot about Chris Vickers? He has a business making superb reproductions of pieces originally made by A&C icons such as Voysey, Grimson and Benson. Really top notch products ( no connection with him - or even been able to buy from him). He has a good website to boot (artsandcraftsdesign.com). Seeing your videos, I do get envy seeing all the houses and interiors that you showcase; I go away thinking about how I could do something affordable with the idea. With all the real hardships that so many have, it seems churlish but I wish we had had the money to make the barn conversion everything that we wished for. Without the legal fees we have had to pay out ( all emanating from our mistake in trusting the RIBA architect), we have had to rein in and make some tough choices. We are trying like mad to be as inventive as we can with the interior; we’ve only got this far by maintaining positivity and that continues.
Great Tudor-revival style mansion. Every inch is well made and everything is proportional to the human scale. The curved arched beams in the ceiling of the vaulted beam ceiling look like the ceiling at St. Giles in Stafforshire which was Pugin's first commission.
Hi Brent, your details and incredible knowledge always amazes me. My parent lived in single story house that to me looked like a church from the 1930 , tyhey added an additional level and made it look like a Tudor house, did the house justice while other old houses in the street were made to look modern it just didn't work. I grew up in a house that was the envy of the entire street. Can you do a tour of the Thorsen House, I just watched this video on it and I was unsatisfied with the detail given, I'm sure you could better. Thanks Rich.
Fabulous house (small request: please change the surround/background on photos, the black & white flashing is super distracting and dangerous if you are an epileptic). Not trying to be mean, I love the building and seeing what you show, I just had to try to cover the blinking background to watch it.
Nice video. I live in Akron and visit Stan Hywet regularly. It is a gem. Seiberlings are a great family, but that picture in your video is not F.A. Sieberling.
