COMMUNITY- SEPTEMBER 10, 2003

Touring homes on Lansing’s scenic river drive

By LAWRENCE COSENTINO

This Sunday afternoon, you may find yourself in an octagonal breakfast nook, gazing down at a magnificent vista of river and forest, the afternoon sun filtering through a tree-fringed skylight. You may also find yourself basking in the charming Tennessee graces of Ms. Mary Ann Dewitt, proud owner of one of Lansing’s most remarkable homes. You may even find yourself strangely jealous of the sumptuous yet cozy labyrinth she has feathered and furnished along with her husband, Lansing dentist Ronald DeWitt.

Isabella Rowan/City Pulse

Mary DeWitt, owner of 3515 Moores River Drive, will be featured in the Westside Home Tour.

You may say to yourself: “This is not my hospitable Southern wife. This is not my octagonal breakfast nook.” But that is the entire point of the 2003 Lansing Home Tour, a showing of five super-duper area homes organized by its beneficiary, the Greater Lansing Housing Coalition, and sponsored by area businesses. It isn’t every day you get to trade places with the likes of the DeWitts, even if it’s only for an afternoon.

The Lansing Home Tour is the year’s crowning delight for all the die-hard domicile voyeurs in the area. Police need a warrant, firemen need a fire, even termites need mandibles, but all the average Home Depot Joe needs is a ticket to cross the threshold and gape at a world apart — a world of oaken ceiling beams and stone gates, a world where bathrooms are “powder rooms,” kitchens come in threes, and even closets seem to have fireplaces. Even more amazingly, all five of this year’s host homes are within a mile or two from the heart of Lansing.

When the coalition’s executive director, Almus Thorp, calls this year’s eighth annual edition of the Home Tour “Return to Moore’s River Drive,” he’s not talking about some neo-Marxist, revenge-on-the-rich horror flick. Home Tour mavens have long clamored for another peep at the exclusive neighborhood just southwest of downtown Lansing, and Thorp is more than delighted to oblige them. After a few years of showcasing its own remarkable restoration work in downtown Lansing and Old Town, the tour is once again following the money.

The mile-long stretch of Moore’s River Drive between Waverly Road and Martin Luther King Boulevard runs through a tall bluff that overlooks a broad stretch of the Grand River. It’s the closest thing to a scenic shoreline drive inside Lansing, a miniature coastal scene right out of Traverse City or Punta Gorda, complete with golf-hatted anglers and whizzing pleasure craft. Against such a backdrop, some 500 people will be shuttled by bus (supplied by Dean Transportation) to five spectacular edifices, along with the newly refurbished Lansing Country Club, where a champagne brunch will open the festivities from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

The tour itself will run from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., making for a more leisurely pace than previous tours, with half a dozen or so strategically placed hosts and hostesses stationed at each home. In addition to the 1954-built home of the DeWitts, the tour will also feature the spectacular dwelling of Paul and Joette Yauk, which Thorp describes as “the most fabulous house we’ve ever had on the tour.” Both the DeWitts and the Yauks are participating in the tour for the first time. Also on the itinerary is the winter home of Mr. and Mrs. R.D. Musser III, president of the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. The other two homes are those of Larry Lee, and Lansing City Councilwoman Joan Bauer and her husband, Doug Langham. A sixth stop is the Country Club of Lansing.

The Home Tour is not just a popular Lansing tradition but also a strategic wonder of all — volunteer social engineering. A neater, more modern three-party variation on the Robin Hood theme can hardly be imagined. A few rich people donate their time, along with the rays of light that bounce off their stuff; a lot of middle class people pay to look at it; a bunch of corporate sponsors join in (this year, to the tune of $35,000); and carefully targeted disadvantaged neighborhoods get the top-notch housing they desperately need. “There is a critical affordable housing crisis in Lansing,” Thorp said. “We have a staggering number of substandard rentals.” In a few weeks, the Coalition will celebrate its 100th rehabilitated house in Lansing, and Thorp is justifiably proud of the increasingly evident difference the coalition is making in the city.

Admirable as the underlying cause may be, the process of actually getting these humongous places ready for a public invasion can entail a furious period of borderline chaos. “You just can’t imagine,” said Mrs. DeWitt, who seemed to be orchestrating several ongoing projects, one of them involving brickwork in the heavily wooded back yard, when City Pulse came over for a sneak peek. “I’m so detail-oriented,” she explained. Some things, like the granite countertops she had planned for the master kitchen, just didn’t come together in time – not that anyone would know but DeWitt herself. “With Mary Ann,” agrees Thorp, “everything needs to be perfect, even when it already is perfect.”

As Thorp points out, many homeowners volunteer their privacy and sanity to become Tour stops not just to help the Coalition, but also to have an excuse to get things done around the house. They could be big things, like room additions and hardwood-floor gazebos, or small things, like wall art or window treatments (although MSU design grad Deb Atkinson would surely object that the scores of coordinated blinds and drapes she put together for the DeWitt house are no “small thing,” and she’d be right). Even the DeWitts’ landscaper, Kevin VanNocker, hoped to hammer a peaked roof onto the two-story treehouse in the frontyard before Sunday, as if the existing flat roof were not up to the Michigan grandchildrens’ code.

The wonders of DeWitts’ home are far too many and varied to name here, nor would we want to spoil the surprises (but just wait until you get to the basement, movie lovers). The truly shocking thing, for rich-people-bashers especially, is the warm and comfortable feeling that pervades its every twist and turn. This isn’t Citizen Kane’s Xanadu, where tiny people shout at each other across hollow rooms full of statues. “People just don’t want to leave when they come here,” DeWitt said.

The profound inertia that seems to overcome Mrs. DeWitt’s guests isn’t due entirely to the home’s fabulous guest suite, which adjoins a steamy tropical atrium and hot tub (although that probably doesn’t hurt). DeWitt simply revels in the sheer fun of living large, and enjoys sharing her delight. She loves to point out the brain-inflaming all-red commode booth sealed off from one of the bathrooms, or a living-room-sized annex to the bedroom suite that lets people “sneak right into the kitchen and eat something without anyone finding out about it.” Both house and hostess encourage a delightful sense of discovery that, let’s face it, you just can’t pack into your average bungalow.

Tickets for the tour are $15, $35 to also attend the champagne brunch. For more information or to order tickets, call GLHC at (517) 372-5980. Information is also available on the web at www.glhc.org.

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