You're looking at the grandest house in Traverse City — round corner turrets, a wide veranda, the whole Queen Anne fairytale. This is the mansion Perry Hannah built for himself in the early eighteen nineties, at the very top of his fortune, and it is exactly as much house as you'd expect from a man who cut down a billion trees and named a town after himself by accident.
Forty rooms. Four floors. Around fourteen thousand square feet. Ten fireplaces — eight of them faced with handmade Venetian tile, shipped from Italy, because if you can build the town you can certainly tile your parlor with imported art. Thirty to sixty craftsmen worked on this place. And one of those tile-setters, working the front parlor fireplace, set a single tile in upside down — homesick, distracted, nobody's ever known — and the Hannahs found it, thought it was charming, and left it. It's still there, one tile facing the wrong way in a sea of perfect ones, if you ever get inside and know to look.
The man who bu
ilt it lived here until he died at the very start of the twentieth century, and they buried him across town at Oakwood Cemetery, under a monument about the size you'd guess.
And here's what the house does now.
Since the nineteen thirties, the Perry Hannah House has been a funeral home. They barely changed it — the woodwork, the fireplaces, the turrets, all still here — they just quietly turned t
