Six Houses Guaranteed to Make Yours Look Puny

Fair Lane, Dearborn, Mich.



Fair Lane was the home of Henry and Clara Ford and was named for an area in Ireland where Henry’s grandfather was born.
Ford isn’t the only luminary to be involved with the house, though. Frank Lloyd Wright helped draw up the original design for the house before leaving for Europe. And Thomas Edison himself laid the cornerstone of the estate’s powerhouse. The top floor of the powerhouse was reserved for Ford’s Experimental Laboratory – the place he would go to tinker around with new ideas.
Despite Ford’s great wealth, the house really wasn’t considered that extravagant by the standards of the day, even though it did have an indoor poor and a bowling alley. That’s not to say that Fair Lane didn’t have it’s share of strange extravagances, though. As an avid bird watcher, Ford had a steam-heated birdbath installed to entice birds to make the estate their permanent dwelling as well.
Oh, and if Fair Lane sounds familiar, it should – the Fairlane Ford cars were named after the mansion. LINK