His Anglo-Tudor estate, a true masterpiece of the Arts %26 Crafts style designed by renowned Detroit architect Albert Kahn, served as an active home for his family of seven for 40 years. Built in 1908, Cranbrook is an English Tudor house built in the American Arts and Crafts style by the famous Detroit architect Albert Kahn. Sitting on the top of a hill overlooking the estate, Cranbrook House was conceived by George Booth as an Arts and Crafts variant of a traditional English manor house with wooden frame. It was designed by Kahn, then a rising young architect in Detroit, who had previously built a barn at Booth's house in the city.
The works of many artists were an integral part of the house. The sculptors Paul Manship and Mario Korbell; the silversmiths Arthur J. Stone, Elizabeth Copeland and Omar Ramsden; Mary Chase Perry Stratton of Pewabic Pottery and Dr. Henry Mercer of Moravian pottery; the Edward J.
Caldwell Studio in New York; blacksmiths Samuel Yellin and Frank Koralewsky; and wood carver John Kirschmayer of Cambridge, Massachusetts, improved Cranbrook House with their art. Cranbrook is famous for its architecture in the Arts and Crafts and Art Deco styles. The chief architect was Eliel Saarinen, while Albert Kahn was responsible for the Booth mansion. The sculptors Carl Milles and Marshall Fredericks also resided for many years in Cranbrook.
The Cranbrook house and gardens are the centerpiece of the campus. The 1909 English Arts and Crafts style house was designed by Kahn for use by the Booth. Ten rooms on the first floor contain tapestries, hand-carved carpentry, and artistic and artisanal antiques. The upper floors of the house are used for the executive offices of the Cranbrook educational community.
. In 1904, newspaper magnate George Booth bought a 174-acre farm 20 miles northwest of Detroit, which he named Cranbrook in honor of his ancient English home. Corfield, Booth, continued to acquire land and supervise workers as they leveled roads and hills, planted grass and created Lake Glastonbury (now Lake Kingswood), fed by waterfalls built from natural springs. Starting in 1909, Booth consulted landscape architect O.
Simonds, who recommended a naturalistic approach to reforesting arid and undulating terrain. The edges of the lake were planted with native shrubs, trees and herbaceous plants, while the roads were lined with forests of pine, red cedars, hazelnuts and dogwood. As the oldest preserved historic mansion in the Detroit metropolitan area, Cranbrook House has a long and illustrious past. In 1971, Henry Scripps Booth and a small group of interested individuals organized what would later become the Cranbrook House Garden Assistant %26 with the intention of preserving, maintaining and sharing Booth's historic manor house and forty-acre estate.
After its completion, Booth began building the Cranbrook Children's School, a college preparatory school exclusively for boys. To learn more about Cranbrook's rich history, visit the Cranbrook Collection and Research Center, home to the Cranbrook Archives.
Cranbrook schools
comprise a mixed day high school and boarding school, a preparatory high school, and a Brookside High School. In 1904, the Booth purchased the land that now consists of the Cranbrook educational community as a location for their summer home.The Cranbrook Institute of Science, inaugurated in 1933, houses a collection of specimens related to natural history and science. The Cranbrook Art Museum maintains a contemporary art collection that includes works by Harry Bertoia, Maija Grotell, Carl Milles, Robert Motherwell, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Booth, an avid supporter of the American Arts and Crafts movement, personally commissioned tapestries, wood carvings, furniture, goldsmithery, glass work, fine bindings and other decorative items from the workshops of leading American and European artisans and craft firms to place them in Cranbrook House. The organization takes its name from Cranbrook, England, the birthplace of George Booth's father.
The founders also built Christ Church Cranbrook as a focal point to serve the educational complex. Cranbrook is famous for its architecture in the style of the Arts and Crafts Movement by principal architects Albert Kahn and Eliel Saarinen. Aside from occasional receptions, parties, concerts, meetings and tours, Cranbrook House received unusual use in the years immediately following George and Ellen Booth's passing. This impeccable classic building, articulated with the Ionian order, was Cranbrook's first facility intended for public use.
It is comprised of the Cranbrook Schools, the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the Cranbrook Museum of Art, the Cranbrook Institute of Science and the Cranbrook House and Gardens. From the entrance yard, in the north, a path leads to the beautiful open-air Greek Theater, designed by Burrowes and built in 1915 (restoration 1990-1991, Quinn Evans). .
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