Okay. Look at this house. This is the Mushroom House, and it is the single most photographed home in Charlevoix, and the moment you see it you understand why. That roof — the wavy, rolling, cedar-shake roof that pours down over the stone like melted wax, like a cap, like something grew here instead of getting built here — that is Earl Young's signature, and this is his masterpiece. He built it in the early nineteen fifties, and people have been standing exactly where you're standing, making exactly the face you're probably making, ever since.
There is not a straight line on it. Not one. Young hated right angles the way other people hate mosquitoes. The stone is rounded fieldstone and glacial boulder, the eaves wave, the rafter tails curve, and the doorway — notice the doorway — is low. Really low. An average adult has to duck. Earl Young was a very small man, somewhere around five foot one, and he built doorways that fit him. The whole reason you have to bow to enter his masterpiece i
s that its creator was shorter than you.
Here's how he worked, and none of it makes any sense. Young didn't start with a house and add stones. He started with a stone — one specific boulder he loved — and built an entire house around it. The rock came first. The home was just the thing you wrapped around the rock so it had somewhere to live. And he did almost all of this without blueprints. The o
