$2.5 million price tag on Detroit mansion an eye-opener
NEAL RUBIN, Detroit News columnist
From the inside, you can see why. You can see the 14-foot ceilings and the hardwood and the love.
From the outside, from the places where logic and reality take over, all you can see is the price tag. It's hanging from a turret, blinking in imaginary red neon: $2.5 million.
In Brush Park. In Detroit. Walking distance from Ford Field and Greektown and, in other directions, probably some places where you'd want to watch your step.
Ten bedrooms, 11½ bathrooms, 135 years of history.
$2.5 million.
That's the asking price, anyway. Whether Ghassan Yazbeck and Marilyn Nash-Yazbeck can get it, or get any offers worth considering, remains to be seen.
They bought the 11,000-square-foot Victorian mansion in 1986, when it was a former low-rent boarding house and they were engaged. Now it's a showplace and they're divorced.
That's part of the problem. They're selling it as a single-family home, but they ran the Inn at 97 Winder as a luxurious bed and breakfast, and that was tough enough when they were united. These days Ghassan is in New York studying design, and Marilyn's putting in 60-hour weeks at her pharmacy on the east side.
"If I made the same effort here," says Nash-Yazbeck, 57, and if she did some advertising and marketing, things might be different. But when her cell phone rings as she's sitting in the front parlor, and a man coming to Detroit for an estate sale wants to book a room for the weekend, she has to turn him down. She'll be filling prescriptions.
"When I come in, even now, I get a charge," she says. She remembers what it was and loves what it is and imagines what it could be.
What can you get for $2.5 million in Detroit? Entire blocks, in a lot of areas. In others, entire square miles.
Nash-Yazbeck will sell you a house — and a dream.
After years of restoration the Yazbeck's opened a luxurious bed and breakfast amid the Crosswinds condo development that has taken over the neighborhood just a stone's throw from Ford Field and Comerica Park. (Photos by Donna Terek / The Detroit News)
The corner bedroom on the third floor has a spiral staircase leading to the top of the building's turret.
The west living room of the former Inn at 97 Winder.
Hard work is done
John Harvey — a pharmacist, like the Yazbecks — built the house in 1876. French mansard roof, gables, bay windows, mahogany and maple floors.
By the 1930s, it was a rooming house. When the Yazbecks saw it on a real estate agent's bus tour, it was a dump: 20-plus bedrooms, 1½ bathrooms, a place for hard-luck tenants getting by with a sink and a hot plate.
Between the renovation and the decoration, Nash-Yazbeck says they've put more than $1 million into the building. The results say it was money spent well, but that doesn't necessarily mean wisely.
A seven-bedroom Tudor in Indian Village, about the same size as 97 Winder St., recently sold for $675,000. "You can go to Palmer Woods and be on Fairway Drive for $500,000," points out Lisa Debs, owner of Suite Properties realty in Detroit. "I could see somebody paying $1.5 million to use it as a business, but I don't think anybody would pay that much to live there."
If the Yazbecks hadn't been optimists, though, they wouldn't have bought it, not even for the $50,000 they parceled out on a land contract. They'll take the furniture and artworks when they go, but they'll leave behind two mammoth water heaters, half a dozen furnaces, lavish window treatments and a chandelier in every room.
$2.5 million. Maybe it'll be a law office, Nash-Yazbeck says, or a hotel annex. Maybe movie companies will lease it for their actors.
The hard work is done. All it takes now is vision and …$2.5 million? That's vision, and a mansion full of faith.
Photo caption: (Top photo) Ghassan Yazbeck and Marilyn Nash-Yazbeck bought the 11,000-square-foot Victorian mansion in Brush Park in 1986, when it was a former low-rent boarding house and they were engaged. (John T. Greilick / The Detroit News)
From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20110206/OPINION03/102060307/$2.5M-price-tag-on-Detroit-mansion-an-eye-opener#ixzz1DHoSZLl2
