The Scripps Mansion: William E. Scripps's Lake Orion Estate and the Detroit News Family's Country Seat

The Scripps Mansion stands at 1840 Scripps Road in Orion Township, Michigan, about thirty-five miles north of downtown Detroit. William Edmund Scripps built it between 1926 and 1927 as the country seat of a 3,830-acre stockbreeding farm. The architect was Clarence E. Day, Scripps's brother-in-law. The landscape was the work of Bryant Fleming, one of the founding figures of American landscape architecture as a profession.

Searches for "Scripps Mansion" pull up two different houses owned by two different Scripps men, and the confusion is constant. James E. Scripps, the founder of the Detroit News, built a Tudor house at the corner of Trumbull and Grand River in 1891. William E. Scripps, his son, built the Lake Orion estate a generation later. The first is in the city. The second is sixty miles of road from it. This guide is about the second.

The two Scripps houses, side by side

James E. Scripps founded the Evening News in 1873 and renamed it the Detroit News in 1905. His 1891 house on Trumbull Avenue, designed by Mason & Rice, was the first Tudor Revival in Detroit and the seed of the city's long affection for the style. It was demolished, and the lot became Scripps Park in the Woodbridge neighborhood. The James E. Scripps Library and Art Gallery, by Albert Kahn, went up on the same block in 1898 and was likewise demolished.

William Edmund Scripps was the son and the sole heir. He built the WWJ radio station, which broadcast its first program from the Detroit News Building in August 1920 and is generally credited as the first commercial broadcast station in the United States. He also flew. In 1916 he began buying farmland in Orion Township, fifteen parcels totaling 3,830 acres around Voorheis Lake. The mansion went up on a rise overlooking the property a decade later.

The geographic fact matters because most queries that send people to the estate carry the wrong city. The Lake Orion property has a Lake Orion mailing address, an Orion Township jurisdiction, and an Oakland County parcel number. It is not in Detroit. It is a forty-five-minute drive on I-75 in light traffic, longer at almost any other hour. See the estate's full architecture entry for nomination details.

The architect, the landscape, the family

Clarence E. Day designed the house in a restrained English country-house manner, with brick, slate, and limestone trim. Bryant Fleming laid out the gardens, the approach drive, and the relationship between the house and the lake. The combination is rare in southeastern Michigan: a country-house estate with a serious landscape design rather than an amenity lawn.

The estate remained in the Scripps family for several generations and now serves as a private retreat and occasional event venue. For Detroit-area estate portraits and engagement sessions in the Lake Orion area, see our engagement photographer page or book a session.