A Self-Taught Builder Made Two Dozen "Hobbit Houses" Out of Beach Boulders

In the lakeside town of Charlevoix, tucked among ordinary streets, sit some of the strangest and most enchanting homes in America. They have wavy, undulating roofs, curving stone walls, crooked chimneys, and arched doorways — they look like they were lifted straight out of a fairy tale, or Middle-earth. Locals call them the Mushroom Houses (also Hobbit Houses or Gnome Homes), and they’re the life’s work of one delightfully stubborn man.

His name was Earl Young, and here’s the kicker: he wasn’t a licensed architect. He studied architecture for about a year at the University of Michigan, then came home to Charlevoix and just started building, beginning in 1918 and continuing for some fifty years. He never used formal blueprints. He sketched ideas on scraps of paper, made decisions on-site, and let the stones themselves dictate the design.

And what stones. Young was obsessed with the boulders, limestone, and fieldstone scattered across northern Michigan by ancient glaciers. He’d roam the shoreline and woods collecting rocks he loved, and — famously — he would bury or sink boulders he wasn’t ready to use yet, leaving them hidden around the county like a squirrel stashing acorns, sometimes for years, until he found the right house for them. His most famous boulder shows the habit perfectly: a nine-ton stone he dug up at Boulder Park in 1928, reburied for some twenty-five years, and finally hauled out to crown the great fireplace at his Weathervane Restaurant.

Over his career, Young built around 30 structures — homes and a few commercial buildings — and every one is different, designed to hug its landscape rather than fight it. They’ve been compared to the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, but they’re truly their own thing. They exist nowhere else on Earth but Charlevoix.