The Tragedy of the Gnome Homes

Charlevoix — Houses were better back in the old days. I hate to write something so depressing, but it’s true. Maybe they didn’t have the best HVAC or the strongest glass in the windows, but they sure were beautiful weren’t they? The grand colonial mansions, the bungalows, the starter homes from the Sears catalog, and the gnome houses Up North.

Those first three you know all about, but that fourth one—do you know about those? Unless you have spent any meaningful amount of time Up North in Charlevoix, you probably have no earthly idea about the peculiar stone gnomey structures in the Boulder Park neighborhood just south of the Charlevoix pier.

Gnome houses, mushroom houses, hobbit houses—whatever you want to call them, they are the lovely, unique creations of Earl A. Young.

Young was born in Mancelona on March 31, 1889, moved to Charlevoix in 1900, enrolled at the University of Michigan School of Architecture in 1908, dropped out in 1909, and built his first home in Charlevoix in 1921.

Young dropped out of the School of Architecture for reasons that are rather obvious if you know anything at all about his architectural style. At that time, the architecture school was teaching mostly Victorian and Neo-Classical architecture. Young just wasn’t terribly interested.

Young wanted his homes to live in harmony with the nature around them. He wanted his buildings to grow up out of the land, not tower over it. He avoided cutting trees when designing homes, was seemingly allergic to straight lines, and had no time for typical A-frame roofs.

In addition to the natural world, Young was further influenced by storybook architecture. Reviving rural European building styles and using local materials, his homes do oddly feel like they are drawn from a fairytale.

Young was devoted to building with stone. The walls on almost all his structures feature large boulders arranged in pleasing yet asymmetrical patterns. The roofs are wavy, made with cedar shingles arranged in an irregular manner. Young famously said that he “built roofs and then shoved the houses underneath,” and that’s exactly how they look.

Over the course of his career, Young built 28 houses and three commercial buildings. In 1924, Young bought a piece of land along the shores of Lake Michigan. He split the land into 85 oddly shaped lots and designed some of his most iconic homes right there. This area of Charlevoix, just south of the pier and west of downtown, is known today as Boulder Park.

Young never actually referred to any of his homes as “gnome homes” or “mushroom houses.” He just thought of them as Earl Young homes. The fun littles names they are known by now only came later from bemused observers. But the colloquial names make perfect sense.

Young’s houses do feel like the kinds of cottages you might see in the Shire with little hobbits walking in and out, and the way they rise up out of the earth with their wavy roofs and stony walls does remind one of mushrooms. It’s worth noting that Young’s most famous home, the most photographed home in Charlevoix, the Boulderdash, was modeled explicitly after a button mushroom.

Young’s homes are fun in their delightfully fungi-like appearance, but there is a little more to them as well. The balance Young struck is incredibly hard to replicate. His homes somehow feel organic, whimsical, fairy tale-like, old, and modern all at the same time. It sounds strange to say that balance exists in these little houses, but it really does.

Young’s homes wouldn’t have been built 50 years prior. People just weren’t doing that kind of thing then. They wouldn’t have been built 50 years later, either. By that time the world had moved onto more inhuman and inorganic forms of architecture leaving the real possibility of anything like Young’s homes forgotten and simply out of reach.

Young was decidedly modern even when building homes that drew on the old folkways. He broke rules of his time and drew with a free hand. Modernity is difficult, and his fusing of these elements together in homes that feel right at home on the northern shores of Lake Michigan is the best kind of modern sensibility imaginable.

I could sit and look at Young’s homes all day. Peering through the trees toward a little window made in stone under a wavy roof hidden away in the shade under a branch feels like peering into another world. Young’s homes really are magical and transportive.

The bittersweet tragedy of Young’s homes are the fact that nothing like them will ever be built again. Or at least not if we stay on the same track we’ve been going. Young’s homes would not pass all the various building codes required by our blessed state in 2026. They would, most likely, simply be illegal to build and that would be that. Today it seems the only things we can build are the inhuman Lego block complexes or cheap pastiches of classic Americana.

And how much would it even cost to build an Earl A. Young mushroom house today? We can’t do it anymore, we forgot how.