Money No Object
My sister, HH, and I went on a guided tour of the Bass House on Saturday as part of the holiday festivities. The Bass brothers started a business making wheels for trains and buggies, etc. in Fort Wayne in the late 1890s when trains were being built to connect most of the country. They made a lot of money. So much money that Mr. Bass bought 300 acres of land outside of the city limits (back then) to build a summer home. Money was no object. And the house could be featured in a Hercule Poirot mystery with its many stairs and bedrooms, its grandeur and opulence and third floor ballroom.
In my Jazzi and Ansel series, the couple and her cousin Jerod buy homes and properties to flip. They take a rundown building and turn it into a welcoming home in hopes of making a decent profit. They go high budget with top-of-the-line appliances and cupboards, but they’ve NEVER been able to go all out. How many of us can? And I wouldn’t have even been able to think of all of the glories we saw at the Bass House.
There was a fireplace in every room, and most of the materials for them came from outside the United States. Marble was imported from Africa for all but one of them. Every ceiling had a painted border with flowers and exquisite designs. Public rooms had painted murals on the walls or fabric wallpaper. My two favorite rooms were the parlor and ballroom. The parlor was made with curved walls and doors to give it an oval design, and a beautiful painting was centered on its ceiling. The flowered carpet was expensive and charming. Special blinds hung at the wall of windows with gorgeous cutouts at the bottoms before the fringes. I’ve never seen blinds like them. The ballroom on the third floor was surrounded by benches with red velvet seats. The center of the ceiling led to a cupola to let in more light and was painted by an artist that worked on the Capitol Building in Washington. Every bedroom had hand carved woodwork with intricate designs.
HH and I have gone to lots of house walks in town that took our breaths away, but never a building like this. It was magnificent. Jazzi, Ansel, and Jerod will renovate beautiful, wonderful homes, but they’ll never work on a property with materials and artists flown in from all over the world. And that’s okay. The Bass family was in a different stratosphere than most of us.
