Thursday, May 1, 2008

"House Beautiful" is right!

After I wrote about Hawkins Ferry and his impact on the overall fabulousness of SE Michigan, I heard from a couple readers who had some additional info on him. One regular reader tipped me off to the fact that Ferry's home had been published in House Beautiful back in 1969, and was even so kind as to give me a mimeograph of a page of it that had the house floorplans.

Obviously that was not enough for me and I had to see the entire feature, and recently my ebay searching bore fruit. Turns out Hawkins not only had a feature, he was the cover story. Naturally. Man, I've got a lot of catching up to do.

All this AND a feature called "Swing to Leather!"


It's a great spread and you get to see all the awesome furniture (hi, have a little Knoll) and art. I LOVE that he had a Giacometti in the living room, and in one photo you can see the awesome Bertoia sculpture "The Comet" that was only recently removed from the house by the Detroit Institute of Arts for restoration. And those upstairs porches outside the bedrooms are a verrrry nice touch.

Because I am a giver, I have taken the time to scan in the feature and I am posting it here. House Beautiful of that time was oversized and my scanner is normal-sized, so I had to perform unspeakable acts on the spine of that magazine and piece together two scans per page to get it, so please forgive the occasional obvious line where two images were joined. It looked fine in my graphics program but something about the conversion to jpg messed it up. Deal.

Each picture links to a larger version, and if you would like a hi-res PDF of the feature you can download it here (it is 30MB).
 
Ooooo and I got a little gossip too. I found out that Hawkins indeed had a boyfriend, a fellow who was Grosse Pointe gay. I have his name, but if you want it you'll have to ask realllllly nicely.












5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Since you mentioned Giacometti, I have to comment. Remember the movie "Legal Eagles" with Robert Redford and Debra Winger? At the end they have to escape from a burning art gallery. To get from the mezzanine to the ground floor they climb down a huge Giacometti sculpture. I still get a kick out of that scene.

Anonymous said...

Supergay:
I am peeing my pants right now while looking over the plans and photos of this house. I am not kidding, I drew pictures of something similar after a dream once. At the time I told my husband I had to stop smoking so much pot.

Loopz

Supergay Detroit said...

Anonymous #1: I remember that movie very well and you've reminded me I need to watch it for an 80's moment! I didn't realize that was a Giacometti they climbed down! Of course I didn't know what a Giacometti was when I saw it ...

Anonymous #2: I recommend you get yourself some adult diapers and an architecture degree! Clearly you are a visionary, only slightly behind your time!

Anonymous said...

It seems that the high-res and pdf links no longer work. Could you please make them available?
Thanks!

Supergay Detroit said...

Sorry about that! I'll get on it ASAP!

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