Woodhouse, John T., House

The John T. Woodhouse House is the former home of one of Detroit's leading tobacco merchants, whose John T. Woodhouse Company was a major wholesale tobacco and cigar establishment in Detroit, one of the largest tobacco manufacturing centers in the country during the late 1800s and early 1900s. The house is one of the few remaining known residential structures designed by George D. Mason, a leading Detroit architect whose career spanned over half a century and who was responsible for the design of some of Detroit's most distinguished landmark buildings, and is a high style example of the Tudor Revival of the early twentieth century. It is also one of a declining number of surviving mansions constructed on Lake Shore Road during the 1910s and 1920s, reflective of the social history of Grosse Pointe and its development as a wealthy residential suburb.

The Woodhouse House is located in the exclusive residential suburb of Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan. Grosse Pointe Township was established in 1848, the village of Grosse Pointe established from part of it in 1879, and another village within the township area, Grosse Pointe Farms, incorporated in 1889 by shoreline residents who wanted to remain separate from the growing Grosse Pointe village.

Lake Shore Road was an Indian trail that later developed into a well-traveled transportation route along Lake St. Clair. The road originated in the city of Detroit and continued into Grosse Pointe Township where it was known as the River Road or the Grosse Pointe Road. In 1851, following the passage of the 1848 Plank Road Act, it was developed as a nine-mile long plank toll road that became known as Jefferson Avenue. In 1915 the section of Jefferson Avenue located in Grosse Pointe was officially named Lake Shore Road. The construction of the road and its route along the lake encouraged development of a summer recreational colony. By the 1860s large summer cottages were being built along Lake Shore Road for wealthy Detroiters, including members of many of Detroit's oldest families. Gothic Revival and Queen Anne summer homes with wide verandahs facing the lake were set in picturesque settings with carefully tended lawns and elegant flower gardens. Many of the "cottages" were given romantic names such as The Poplars, Lake Terrace, Tonnacour, Cloverleigh, and Edgemere.

The construction of the interurban railway system connecting Detroit to Mt. Clemens in the 1890s along Lake Shore Road and the paving of the road for developing auto travel in the early 1900s were important factors in the change of Grosse Pointe Farms from a summer colony to a year-round residential community. As the population of Detroit grew, many of the city's wealthiest residents were eager to relocate their homes away from the crowded conditions of the city. The summer cottages were demolished and replaced by mansions surrounded by formal landscaped gardens. The largest estates were located along Lake Shore Road, set back from the roadway with open views of Lake St. Clair. Built in the late 1800s and early 1900s, these homes exhibited a wide array of architectural styles including Tudor Revival, Queen Anne, and Colonial Revival. Many were designed by leading Detroit architects.

The period of growth in Grosse Pointe Farms during the 1910s and 1920s is reflected in the size and finishes of the homes at this time. The look of the "English manor house" became a popular trend, and many homes were modeled after specific manor houses in Great Britain. The increasing use of brick and stone reflected a desire to capture the look of permanence and stability of castles and country estates. Detroit's wealthiest businessmen, including many automobile magnates, constructed homes in this style designed by the area's prominent architects including Albert Kahn, George D. Mason, Stratton and Baldwin, and Smith, Hinchman and Grylls.

Today, Grosse Pointe Farms remains one of metropolitan Detroit's most prestigious neighborhoods. High land values and resulting intensifying building densities have brought about the demolition of many of the larger old homes. Those early mansions that have survived are now generally surrounded by newer subdivisions of homes, the views of the houses from Lake Shore Road lost by the subdivision of the once spacious grounds.

The John T. Woodhouse House was designed by the prominent Detroit architect, George D. Mason (1856-1948). Mason came to Detroit with his parents in 1870 from Syracuse, New York. In 1875, without any formal training, he began work in the office of architect Henry T. Brush. By working on numerous projects, including the old Public Library, he learned the trade well enough that in 1878 he went into partnership with Zachariah Rice, a family friend. Their first project was a stable for Thomas Berry of the Berry Paint and Varnish Company. Although only in their early twenties, the two young men received one of Detroit's major architectural commissions, the D.M. Ferry and Company office and warehouse building, in 1881; it was destroyed by fire in 1886. In 1882, the firm designed one of the first substantial year-round large houses in Grosse Pointe, the Joseph H. Berry house (also demolished). Reminiscent of the Watts Sherman house in Newport, Rhode Island, the house was designed in the Queen Anne style with extensive detailing and romantic whimsicality.

George D. Mason was the creative force behind Mason and Rice, which grew to be one of the major architectural firms in the state. In 1887 they designed the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. The firm continued to design magnificent homes throughout the late 1800s in Detroit and Grosse Pointe. Their list of clients included many prominent Detroiters such as the newspapermen James E. Scripps and George Gough Booth. Mason and Rice separated in 1900 and Mason briefly became a partner with his former apprentice, Albert Kahn. After that partnership dissolved, the firm operated as George D. Mason and Company until Mason's death. In his later years Mason was considered the dean of Detroit architecture. He was responsible for the design of many Detroit landmark buildings including the Detroit Masonic Temple and the Century Club/Gem Theatre.

Between 1917 and 1920 Mason designed the John T. Woodhouse House for property that Woodhouse owned on Lake Shore Road. Woodhouse was president of the John T. Woodhouse Company, one of the largest wholesale tobacco merchants in the state. During the last half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth, Detroit was one of the leading tobacco products manufacturing centers in the country. By 1911 the city had three hundred cigar manufacturers in the city producing 250,000,000 cigars a year. The majority of them were small establishments, but there were a few that became major suppliers of tobacco to the surrounding region and to the nation. Tobacco leaves were imported from Cuba and Sumatra and from just across the border in Ontario. By the 1920s over a million cigars were manufactured a day with the majority of the cigars hand-made.

John T. Woodhouse came to Detroit from Brantford, Ontario, with his family when he was a young man. In 1875 the family lived on Porter Street in Detroit's Corktown section and young Woodhouse started working as a porter. Later he served as a telegraph operator. In 1880 he became a clerk at the M.L. Wagner Company, a small tobacco products manufacturing company in the city. By 1881 he had become partners in the business with Robert Wagner and the firm became R. Wagner and Company. The company flourished and by 1892 had become the Wagner and Woodhouse Company, located on Woodward Avenue near Jefferson Avenue. By 1901 the company became John T. Woodhouse & Company with the partners listed as Mary Wagner and Charles Patterson. By 1911 Woodhouse was president and sole owner and the company moved to a larger building at Griswold and Jefferson Avenue where Hart Plaza is located today. He continued to build the company until it was one of the largest wholesale tobacco establishments in the state with locations both in Detroit and Grand Rapids. Woodhouse remained president until the late 1920s when he passed ownership of the company to his son, John T. Woodhouse Jr.

Woodhouse was married three times. His first wife was Alice Goodyear with whom he had five children and who died in 1911. Woodhouse was married in 1913 to his second wife, Elizabeth, who soon became a popular Detroit socialite. This second marriage ended in a bitter divorce in 1925.

While married to Elizabeth, Woodhouse hired George Mason to design the house being nominated to the national register. Known as "East Hall," the house was constructed between the years 1918 and 1920. It is similar in design to Mason's 1915 Charles T. Fisher House on West Boston Boulevard in what is now the Boston-Edison Historic District in Detroit. The Woodhouse House was located on a large landscaped lot with the front facade facing Lake Shore Road with a picturesque view of Lake St. Clair and the rear facade facing Grosse Pointe Boulevard. The lot bordered the Grosse Pointe Waterworks on the east and Beacon Hill Avenue on the west. The house had an idyllic setting that included a small stream that crossed the property, a duck pond, sheep and chickens kept in the backyard, and a cascading brook that fell over low stone walls toward the circular drive at the rear of the house. A few years later, in 1926, Woodhouse constructed a Colonial house for his son John T. Woodhouse Jr., and his wife, the former Annette Foster Macauley, at the back of the lot at 312 Grosse Pointe Boulevard.

John T. Woodhouse Sr. married a third time in 1929, but, despondent over financial losses caused by the economic climate of the late 1920s, he took his own life at "East Hall" in 1930. Woodhouse's funeral service was held there and was attended by a multitude of his contemporary Detroit business associates. After Woodhouse's death, his son, John T. Woodhouse II, now president of the John T. Woodhouse Company, moved into the house. He began to sell off parts of the property as house lots, with the first house built in the early 1930s.

In the 1940s the tobacco company was known as the Woodhouse Cigar Company and was still one of the major suppliers of tobacco products in the state. The company relocated in the early 1950s to a building at 7645 Gratiot due to the development of the Detroit Civic Center at the foot of Woodward. But the company maintained a strong presence in downtown Detroit with ownership of five popular tobacco stores that, located in prominent buildings, including the Penobscot and Buhl buildings, were managed by John Woodhouse III. John III inherited the company upon the death of his father in 1967. The company fell on hard times as a result of the political upheaval in Cuba, where the popular Havana cigars were manufactured, in the late 1950s and, never fully recovering, was closed in 1971. After the death of John Woodhouse II in 1967 the house on Old Brook Lane was put up for sale.

In 1969 the house was featured as a Designers' Show House for the Planned Parenthood League of Detroit and was opened to the public for tours. The house was purchased in 1974 by Drs. E. G. and Aspasia Metropoulos with their three sons, George, John, and Peter. E.G. Metropoulos, M.D. is a native of Detroit, his parents having immigrated from Greece. His wife, Aspasia Mazi-Metropoulos, M.D., the daughter of a European auto pioneer, came from Athens, Greece, to the United States for her post-graduate medical training as a physician.

The Metropoulos family began renovation work immediately upon purchase of the house that included incorporating modern conveniences such as central air-conditioning, new electrical and water services, and security systems, while retaining the beauty and manorial presence of the house. The family enclosed the open porch, rebuilt the terrace, and began landscaping the gardens with the addition of fountains and sculptures of Greek gods and goddesses that complement the embedded sculptured heads of Zeus on the front of the house and Hera on the lakeside of the house.

The John T. Woodhouse House is a large two-and-one-half-story Tudor Revival house of picturesque form and irregular massing, displaying a combination gable and hip roof and facades finished in rock-face random ashlar limestone in the first story and stucco above, with trimmings of smooth-cut limestone. The gables display broad vergeboards and stucco and vertical half-timbering. The house today occupies a one-and-one-half-acre lot, the remnant of a once much more extensive estate.

The house is located in Grosse Pointe Farms, one of five exclusive residential communities to the east of the city of Detroit that are commonly referred to collectively as Grosse Pointe. The five communities are Grosse Pointe Park, the Village of Grosse Pointe, Grosse Pointe Farms, Grosse Pointe Shores, and Grosse Pointe Woods. Grosse Pointe has long been established as the residential destination of Detroit's wealthiest citizens. The area lies along the shore of Lake St. Clair, with the largest homes located along the lake, subdivisions of upper-class private homes on adjoining streets, and smaller but prestigious upper middle and middle-class homes in the area along Mack Avenue. Many of the largest, most opulent estates have been demolished and replaced by subdivisions of newer, upscale houses on smaller lots.

The Woodhouse House originally stood by itself on a large landscaped estate that extended from Lake St. Clair to Grosse Pointe Boulevard. The front facade faced Lake Shore Road with a picturesque view of Lake St. Clair. Subdivision of the property began during the 1930s and most of the former estate has since been developed with residential structures. Entrance to the estate is now from a short secluded road called Old Brook Lane that runs through the subdivision. The house sits on a small but still spacious lot of about three-quarters of an acre. The main entry to the house is in the northwest facade that faces a circular drive and overlooks the rear of the lot. A circular drive and remnants of a stone wall surrounding the property survive from the time when the house was constructed. The current owners are carefully restoring the house and creating sculpture gardens on the grounds.

The John T. Woodhouse House is compound in shape with a number of gabled projections from the hip-roof principal mass of the house. It is Tudor Revival in style, with English Renaissance detailing, giving something of the appearance of a great English manor. The first floor of the house is finished in random ashlar cladding, the second floor in stucco, and the roof in tile. The house is unusual in displaying two prominent facades. The southeast facade that was once visible from Lake Shore Road overlooks a sculpture-filled terrace and garden. The doorway is located in the center of the facade with an elaborate stone broken pediment frame containing garlands of fruit and the sculptured head of the Greek goddess Hera. The doorway holds double multi-light doors and is flanked by large window "sidelights." A two-story semi-hexagonal limestone window bay fronts a gabled extension next to the entrance. Both floors of the window bay contain vertical multi-light windows with decorative carved stone panels. The house displays various window forms including banks of double-hung windows and narrow casements, with the windows outlined by subtle limestone quoins. On the second floor above the entrance is a metal balconet under a broad tripartite window. At the east end of the facade is a one-story gabled porch that was once open but is now enclosed with multi-pane windows.

The main entrance to the house is located on the northwest facade that faces a circular drive. The facade is irregular in shape with multiple half-timbered gables with bargeboard. The main doorway is set in the center of the facade in a square-headed limestone door surround with a sculptured stone head of Zeus centrally positioned above the door in place of a keystone. The doorway is flanked on either side by a narrow casement window lighting the vestibule. Above the door is a slightly projecting bank of four transomed narrow casement windows with its base supported on projecting joists with rounded ends. A larger beam at each end displays a sculptured head. A third sculptured head occupies the end of one of the support beams of the gable above the main doorway. Lights fill the top six panels of the twelve-paneled wood door. Three chimneys of patterned brickwork rise above the roof.

The one-story attached garage, located on the northeast side of the house, was constructed in 1946. It contains two wide doors and is framed by stone piers supporting an overhang with exposed rafter tails. The garage partially obscures the facade of the house that has overlapping half-timbered gables with bargeboard. The northeast wall is similar in design to the main facades with ashlar cladding on the first floor and stucco on the second floor.

The interior of the house retains most of its original Tudor Revival architectural detailing, although all of the original light fixtures and two lion figures that once stood at the main stairway were sold at the estate auction of the former owner. Entrance to the house is through a small entry vestibule located under the main stairway. The vestibule has an arched doorway with French doors that open onto the manorial entrance hall and main staircase. The staircase has a heavy carved dark oak balustrade and newel posts carved with the images of hunters. The hall has a heavy oak beamed ceiling and oak floor. Opposite the entry are windows that, overlooking the front garden, are set in huge limestone surrounds with keystones. Large oak paneled doors leading to the living room and former dining room are set in stone Tudor arches.

The oak wainscoting of the living room was painted before the house was sold in the 1970s. The living room has a richly carved stone fireplace with a fleur-de-lys keystone in its frieze and detailing that includes acanthus and grape leaves. The room also has a patterned relief plaster ceiling and dark oak floors. Bookcases in the living room are framed in engaged Ionic columns and display figurative heads carved on the panels of the lower cabinet doors. Steel casement French doors in the living room lead to the sun room with its smooth-dressed stone ashlar walls and a Pewabic tile floor.

The former dining room is now used as a sitting room and has a decorative molding with patterned frieze encircling the room. The former breakfast room, now converted to a dining room, has a Pewabic tile floor. Wood paneling from Chile installed some time in the 1970s now decorates the walls of the current dining room.