This is the Thatch House, and it's the story of the one time Earl Young got beaten by a roof.
You've spent this whole tour looking at cedar-shake roofs — the wavy wooden ones. But on this house, Young tried something he never tried anywhere else, before or after. He topped it with real thatch. Actual bundled straw thatch, the kind you'd see on a cottage in the English countryside, the kind that had basically never existed anywhere in northern Michigan because northern Michigan is not, in any sense, the English countryside. The town tells it that he had the thatch itself brought over from England, hauled across an ocean and half a continent to sit on a roof in a lake town where the nearest thatched cottage was about four thousand miles away.
And for a little while, it was magnificent. Imagine it — a warm, shaggy, golden straw roof, smelling of hay, sitting in the snow. It was the most out-of-place, wonderful thing, a little piece of the wrong continent dropped onto Park Avenue.
Lake
Michigan disagreed.
Because here's what nobody told the thatch: the winters up here are savage, and the storms come screaming straight off the big lake, and thatch — beautiful, romantic, English thatch — is basically a roof made of the thing straw is. Every spring, Young had to climb up and repair it, patch the holes the winter tore open, rebuild what the wind had stripped away. Year after year a
