It is an incredible opportunity to own an excessive number of putti and dead peacocks (I think there were only two, but any is too many).

I think it is interesting that this is marketed with terms such as "show stopper" and "incredible opportunity" when houses like these are all being marketed ambiguously, touting the real estate parcel, and hinting at a possible tear-down situation (of course these houses sit on valuable real estate and the Flint house, does not, I assume)--or in some cases were marketed as gut remodels (and have been gutted).

I think a number of todays mansion-sized McMansions will suffer the same fate as this.

Sure. That house I linked is certain to fall into this category, even though they spent more than ten years and who knows how much money building it. But while they no doubt thought they were building a classic for the ages, by the time they finished it was just tired Tuscan on a big scale.

I believe if McMansions were not in suburbs and in metro areas they would become multiple family apartment dwellings just like many Victorian and turn of the century mansions did. But because they were built in less desirable areas where property was vastly available and cheap their plight is for vacant ruin in many cases....

i have a question, why two separate tax amounts, one for winter and one for summer? I might understand if it were lake front property but it is seems not to be. Is it common in other states to have winter and summer tax bills if not on a ski resort or water front property?

The thing about Victorian houses is that they could mostly be converted to apartments or boarding houses without a ton of work because they were mostly a series of closed off rooms with maybe a large pair of parlors and a dining room to be subdivided. Plus they were as sturdy as anything.

Now a McMansion is often one or two gigantic interconnecting spaces on the main floor with an open staircase and a number of irregular bedrooms upstairs, and they could never be divided appropropriately and meet modern fire code requirements. And they are not well built for the most part and too tightly sealed from the outside.

The building I lived in was a boarding house and a dormitory with few essential changes, and the neighborhood it was in had houses that withstood a century of benign neglect. Close up or neglect a modern house and it starts to rot from within in less than a year.

I stopped reading at Michigan.

Because.....?

Words fail me - honestly.

Sweet Jesus. That is the most hideously ugly home I have EVER seen. And I have seen a few in my time. And my daughter lives in Michigan. In a much nicer and smaller home

I kept thinking I would LOVE to go to the "estate" sale. There are a lot of fun odds and ends one might find a home for. The statuary was crazy--almost scary all in one home? It had the feeling of that old Debbie Reynold's movie "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" after she got rich. A lot of the decorating SCREAMS "isn't this how the rich folk live?"

It would be fun to go to the estate sale! My thoughts were: ceilings are so low and there are fabulous pieces of furniture which must have been great fun to collect (the wooden bar for example) but everything looks tired and sort of dirty (could be all the cream colors). If I were selling, I'd take new pictures with MUCH better lighting (and spring foliage). I'm filing away one of the kitchen pictures as an example of why matching backsplash to CT may not work....

Egads, that made me claustrophobic. The weird camera angle made every room look like it had 7' ceilings. Except the master, which needs all that air volume to absorb the water vapor from the hot tub.

I couldn't help but think of Niles Crane. I wonder where the gift wrap room is? :)

My landscape side is running away, screaming, from the lawns dotted with miscellaneous bushes and trees.

OMG! Not only is the floor plan unlivable, the décor makes a Las Vegas bordello look conservative.

That's not a bedroom, that's a bowling alley!

Nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there!

Liberace would have happily lived here.

Every time I see the title of Pal's post, in my brain the phrase "absolute show stopper" automatically changes to "absolute sh.. show".

What a show! So many things to comment on, so little time and space. Everybody needs a safari room with a lion in the corner. Sweet dreams! And speaking of dreams, what child could dream in a room in a room filled with stuff like that? Almost the entire house was a bit creepy to me, right down to the carpeted workout room, and the dead vines over the front entry.

Looks like water damage in the upper, right corner of photo 13. Just curious...........who decorates like that?!!??!!? UGH!

I don't think it's water damage, I think it's just the shadow of the beams from the bright light behind the giant dangling painting/room divider.

Words fail me.

Reminded me of a poem we had to learn as kids:

"There was a Sunday morning when

My older sister said

"I'll take you to the museum",

And that was where we went"

(an approximate translation from Russian is mine)

The only show stopper I see is - 'STOP the show, I want to leave now!' I found it depressing to go through the photos.

It would be a great movie set! But it seems a bit too much "Beauty and the Beast" to live in comfortably at the moment.

Wow. What a mess. Makes me think of my mother in law's dusty and bedraggled twenty year old 'silk' flower arrangements of giant magnolias in a gilded vase--trying to look fancy, but the faux+age+dust making it look the opposite. I'd much rather have a milk bottle with fresh flowers in it, and the house version as well. The peacock+rifles was just alarming.

Was Snookie the interior designer? Truly a monument to appallingly bad taste. Only a fire could fix this hot mess....

I said eeek aloud before I could stop myself and woke the cats.

Sad.

Sensory overload for me. And my allergies flared up just looking at it virtually with all those dust traps!!!

So many strange/odd things that I cannot comment on all of them. I did like the landscape painting on page 13 (also on page 11 at a different angle) but it took me a while to figure out that it was hung on a mirror wall. At first I thought it was suspended in air with another painting behind it!

I could not get past the headless footman on page 31. That creeped me out big time.

What do you call this style? It seemed to start out as Art Nouveau, but there was no consistency. It's not quite at the Mad Prince Ludwig French neo-Rococo level, but getting somewhat close.

I stopped reading at Michigan.

Because.....?

Thank you, my thoughts exactly!

That house is creepy!

I live about 40 minutes south from there. During the recession I'd go to the area often to do property appraisals for the banks. Flint has been in blight for years and the water issue is just one of it's many many problems. If you are unfortunate enough to live there, you can't give property away, no one wants it! Grand Blanc on the other hand, isn't that bad. It's just 10 minutes south of Flint but has enjoyed some steady growth over the years when it comes to starter homes. However it's in no way a place anyone with any amount of money would choose to live. To describe that property like that is just flat out a joke. If and when it ever sells, it will go for a fraction of the list price and the buyer will ultimately be a builder interested in putting up some more cheaply built tract homes.

That said, we live in Oakland county which really does have some of the most expensive (and beautiful) properties in the state; many of which are in Bloomfield Hills and lake front. That area is gorgeous and home to many of the auto executives. It's especially stunning in the fall.

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/1780-Hammond-Ct_Bloomfield-Hills_MI_48304_M43508-31511#photo10

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/2600-Turtle-Lake-Dr_Bloomfield-Hills_MI_48302_M43007-05670#photo8

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/2600-Turtle-Lake-Dr_Bloomfield-Hills_MI_48302_M43007-05670#photo8

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/1780-Hammond-Ct_Bloomfield-Hills_MI_48304_M43508-31511#photo10

Bloomfield Hills has a lot of great architecture, and Irving Tobocman built some really great late-modernist houses there, of which I have saved many pictures.

Does anyone share my desire to go in and rescue the house? That's always been my problem...wanting to be a home paramedic!

Yes it really does, are you also familiar with the homes from "old money in the Grosse Pointe Farms, Grosse Pointe Shores and Gross Pointe Park areas?

These have some little quirkey odds and ends you might enjoy.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/750-Whittier-Rd-Grosse-Pointe-Park-MI-48230/88582505_zpid/

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/138-Kenwood-Rd-Grosse-Pointe-Farms-MI-48236/88094011_zpid/

And this house used to belong to Barry Gordy

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/138-Kenwood-Rd-Grosse-Pointe-Farms-MI-48236/88094011_zpid/

I try to avoid going down to Detroit as much as possible, so I've never been to the area these homes are in.

It looks more like a museum or something you would tour or even perhaps a hotel of some sort. I hate the decor...YUCK!

That home was built by a US citizen who was a Grand Blanc native AND a real estate developer.

Lukki, I do go to the area of all those homes and have seen the exteriors of all. Great places with so much history!

My first guess would have been that it was built for one of the executives at the GM plant. I'm not a Michigan native, but there's no doubt that back in 1971 that area was a completely different place.

I'm guessing bonnie_ann has never been to Michigan and admired all its beauty and splendor, or driven down the winding streets of Kirkway Road or Vaughan Road with all of the gracious homes, or visited "up north" in the summer time, when you're lazing around on a lake, drinking pop and eating fudge, surrounded by some of the nicest, most unpretentious people you've ever met. You're missing out, bonnie_ann, because Michigan is amazing!

Wow. I actually found myself almost sad while looking through those photos. Do they take all that with them when they move to the new place? I was surprised the kitchens were understated and small compared to the rest.

I think I'd rather live in one of those little mini houses over that.

I think the kitchens may have been in the staff quarters or guest quarters. There is a large kitchen that matches the rest of the house.

In this case I am thinking it is an estate, because there is dust everywhere as if the house has not been fully used recently.

Naturally a house like this would have a lamp with a fringed lampshade.

And what's with the books on the topmost shelf on that library wall? The ladder is, what, 6' too short to reach them!

The old adage is still true....money doesn't buy class.

I agree with jakkom, money but no taste. The whole time I was looking from room to room, in my head I was screaming "OH NO this is so wrong...tacky tacky tacky!"

One more side note, if you have ever seen the Michael Moore documentary "Roger and Me" you would know that Flint was the home of Buick's world headquarters until the late 70'/early 80's I believe. When GM decided to pull Buick out of Flint and relocate to Detroit it made a HUGE economic impact on the area. Grand Blanc is 10 miles south of Flint. My guess is that the real estate developer who built this home had many auto executives for customers but there is no explaining his taste. I have been to Grand Blanc once to attend a wedding at the lovely Warwick Hills Golf Club ( where the PGA Buick Open used to be held) . Like lukkirish, we live in the suburbs of Detroit, but on the eastside on Lake St. Clair.

My general impression is that developers and builders often have much more exuberant (or even vulgar) taste than is displayed in the properties they develop or build for other people. And the more money they have, the more exuberant.

I can almost always get past the décor to see potential in the structure. Not this time. I feel like I want to give my eyes a bath, and am reminded of just about every horror movie I've ever seen. What a hideous "home."

" give my eyes a bath", love it, I will use that line!

Yes, unfortunately this is not a case of an underlying house that is okay but just decorated oddly and crammed full of stuff, I think the basic architecture leaves a lot to be desired.

Lukki is right, although Grand Blanc isn't Flint, but if you have the money and a taste for such a house, you'd probably look elsewhere. And, as someone here questioned, 50 acres is not unusual in many parts of Michigan. My sister has close to 30 acres, with a very large swimming pond, horses, barns, woods, etc. Many people, including them, have golf carts to get around their property on. She's in Michigan but closer to Richmond. If we ever moved back to Michigan, I'd look for a place out that way. Or in Grosse Pointe, which is where my dad was from. I love those beautiful red brick homes and mansions. But as for the home featured here, it is so fussy, busy, tired, claustrophobic in some rooms, and ridiculously over-sized in others that I can't begin to imagine living there!

I went and looked at her blog. She is WAY into French. When I first looked at the photos French palaces done with hideously bad taste sprang to my mind. Versailles in Michigan.

i visited Michigan last year. My oldest daughter and only grandchild live there. It is a gorgeous state. And those lakes, big and small? Stunning.

First time I've ever seen a ping pong room with a coffered ceiling. But then again, I don't get out much.