A Newspaper Family Turned Their Estate Into One of the World's Great Design Schools

North of Detroit, in Bloomfield Hills, there’s a 300-acre campus so beautiful that people describe it as a kind of enchanted village — schools, a science museum, an art museum, gardens full of sculpture, all designed as a single work of art. It’s called Cranbrook, and it grew out of one family’s dream.

The family was George Gough Booth, a Detroit newspaper publisher, and his wife, Ellen Scripps Booth. Devoted to the Arts and Crafts movement — the idea that beautiful, handmade things make for a better life — they wanted to turn their country estate into a community devoted to art, science, and education. (They named it Cranbrook after the English village where George’s father was born.)

To build their vision, they brought in a Finnish architect named Eliel Saarinen, who had come to America after a famous skyscraper competition. Saarinen designed the campus in stages through the 1920s, ’30s, and early ’40s — and he didn’t just design the buildings. He designed the furniture, the gardens, the details, top to bottom, often working with his wife and children. His son, Eero Saarinen, grew up there and went on to design the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

Cranbrook became one of the most influential places in American design. Future legends studied or taught there, including furniture designers Charles Eames and Harry Bertoia. Today the whole place is a National Historic Landmark, and much of it is open to the public — the art museum, the science museum, Saarinen’s own restored house, and the gardens dotted with sculptures by the Swedish artist Carl Milles.