Earl Young and the Mushroom Houses

If the cottages around you look like something out of a storybook, that is the work of one stubborn, self-taught dreamer named Earl Young. Born in eighteen eighty-nine, Young spent about fifty-two years designing and building roughly thirty-one structures in Charlevoix, and here is the twist that locals love to repeat. He was never a registered architect.

He studied architecture briefly at the University of Michigan but never finished, and he never worked from formal blueprints. He carried the plans in his head and drew them in the dirt with a stick. What he did have was an obsession with stone.

Young roamed all over Northern Michigan hunting for limestone, fieldstone, and enormous glacial boulders left behind by the ice age. When he found a rock he loved but could not yet use, he was known to bury it, sometimes for years, and dig it back up when the right house finally came along. He believed a home should fit its landscape rather than force the land to fit the house, so his roofs sweep and curve like the caps of mushrooms, with wide wavy eaves, exposed rafter tails, and cedar shingles that ripple like something grown rather than built.

People call them the gnome homes, the Hobbit houses, and most often the mushroom houses. His first stone building went up between nineteen eighteen and nineteen twenty-one on Park Avenue, and it held the first of his celebrated boulder fireplaces. In the mid nineteen twenties he bought land west of town along Lake Michigan and created a neighborhood he called Boulder Park, where he eventually built about ten stone homes tucked into the dunes.

For decades tourists have wandered these blocks trying to spot every one. In twenty sixteen the city finally created a local historic district to protect eleven of the houses, along with the original landscaping, so that a man who never earned an architecture license could never have his masterpieces torn down. Look closely at the chimneys.

No two stones were ever meant to match.