Dream Houses

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Since the home was built, Osler has added bays and an upstairs screen porch and moved bedroom walls. "I've played with it over the years, but it's basically the same," he says. Now in his nineties, he never thought when he was building it that he might one day prefer to live in a one-floor house without stairs, but he has no intention of moving.

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Kingsbury Marzolf describes his house at 1420 Granger as a "Scandinavian row house." His wife Marian's maternal grandparents came from Sweden, and the couple has visited Scandinavia many times. Marzolf designed the house before moving to Ann Arbor to teach at the architecture school, but didn't build until 1967, when he found a suitable site--a narrow lot that had been the side yard of an older house. It worked perfectly: Marzolf's plan was for a narrow part facing the street and most of the windows on the front and back.

Although the house is clearly Modern, with a wooden front and brick sides, Marzolf made sure it would fit in the neighborhood by raising it to the height of the other houses and eschewing the flat roof often found in this style. "I like houses to have caps," he explains. Marzolf hired Calvin Hoeft to build the house but closely watched the progress. "I must have taught because I got paid, but I don't remember. I just remember coming over twice a day and taking pictures," he says. He often used it as a case study for his classes.