Late Night Real Estate: Carpeted Wet Bars in Grand Rapids
“WHAT THE FUCK’S UP GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN” is what you’ll say as you careen through your living room, an open bottle of Moet & Chandon in hand and a Bossa Nova cover of “A Horse With No Name” simpering out of the speaker. You nearly miss falling into your living room hot tub as you walk through the sliding glass doors, and you didn’t really work today and you should call your family, but you just got food delivered from Hungry Howie’s down the road. 3322 Rickman Ave Ne in Grand Rapids is not for sale, which may seem peculiar for us, a real estate agency. And yet someday it WILL be for sale, and anyhow it’s best you have a year or two to get your affairs in order because we can’t guarantee where life will take you after living in a home with blue carpet, mirrored walls, and an indoor hot tub.
Michigan has the wildest homes, man. Something about the snow or the lakes must inspire bodacious and warm interiors. The outside of this Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired mid-century home absolutely doesn’t give away what lies inside. It’s standard brick, brown trim, a modestly kept yard. Upon walking in, a ’70s wrought-iron staircase, a vanity lightbulb fixture, and movie-screen window greet you. Camel tones keep this living room looking like your rich aunt’s purse.
This home has some gorgeous retro built-ins, like the double desks in the study. You, a fireplace, and your magazine collaging. Oh, and wood paneling! The real maraschino cherry is the sunroom, an opulent tableau of a wrought-iron, Greek key-accented staircase, an in-ground jacuzzi literally right behind your sofa, skylights, and milky-coffee carpets. Winter — and problems from the other places you were before — will hardly exist in this room.
Things only get zanier from here! The main bedroom is a California King dream with a Palm Springs Regency chandelier, walls made of brushed mirrored tiles, and floral wallpaper. The accompanying bath is all strawberries and cream. Someone GROOVY lived here! Another bedroom has blue shag carpet and psychedelic wallpaper, with a bathroom that has textured, blue-and-green carpet, pure ’70s with robin’s egg blue fixtures.
My god, then there’s the basement! CARPETED walls in earth shades with a CARPETED wet bar and kitchen. Start your own small, strange community in that basement and someone will make a zine about it a few decades from now! Grand Rapids has a Wikipedia-explained past as a historic furniture-making city, with five of the world’s top office furniture companies based in the city. It is apparently nicknamed “Furniture City,” which you’ll be able to write in a letter to your friends back home. Furniture City: Population Y-O-U! President Gerald Ford is from there.
In 2011, Newsweek called Grand Rapids a “dying city” because of its drop in population over a ten-year period. Someone made a music video in response with 5,000 people lip-dubbing (?) which moved Roger Ebert to call it the “greatest music video ever made.” One more thing! There’s an abandoned seven-story pyramid sitting in an overgrown field that’s called the Steelcase Pyramid. Steelcase, a manufacturer of the aforementioned office furniture built it as a research and development center, with massive underground testing rooms for sound and temperature. Now, as Atlas Obscura tells us, the building is dormant and waiting for a tenant who needs a “sprawling futuristic pyramid with a secret manufacturing bunker underneath.”
A dying city that isn’t, an office-furniture pyramid, and your ass in an indoor hot tub? Bless up! See the full listing on Realtor.com, and see you in Grand Rapids.
Photos courtesy of Realtor.com!
