One of the many reasons clients work with The Ferraro Group is that customers find the three primary service professionals they’ll need under one roof— architect, interior designer and builder. They also get Mike Ferraro’s many decades of experience in universal design (sometimes known as aging in place) and high performance building (otherwise knows as green building). And beyond all of that, his clients find that Mike has an incredible capacity to adopt, tweak and tailor a plan in any direction the homeowners would like to go.
And so it was when a prospective client named Judy Treadway came to him with photos of a home she’d pulled off the Internet. It was a spectacular contemporary Craftsman-style home, marked by a sophisticated level of stone and woodwork. Mike couldn’t help but smile when he saw the photos. His own wife, Jeanne, had pulled the same pictures off the web and hoped to build the same home. “The home is exceptionally ornate on the exteriors with lots and lots of wood details in the eaves, in the siding, on the porch pillars,” Mike says.
The couples got to calling the plan the J & J house for Judy and Jeanne. Judy and her husband, Gary, hoped to build their version on a lovely wooded lot on Long Lake on the outskirts of Traverse City. Before they got around to breaking ground, however, they sold the property to their son Corey and his wife, Sarah. As it turned out, Corey and Sarah loved the J & J house, as well. Only, of course, they asked Mike to help them tweak the plan.
The home that now graces the lot on Long Lake is a contemporary version of the original J & J home. The younger Treadways opted to lighten the use of timber and stone in the plan, and Mike helped them add touches specifically suited to their young family, including personalized closet cubbies in the foyer and turning the room original earmarked as the formal dining room into an office for Corey. In lieu of a formal dining space, the family eats in a nook of the kitchen/great room under a pecan wood cone-shaped ceiling—one of those distinctive home features that tour-goers will remember long after the tour is over. Other fabulous touches in this home are the three-dimensional wall tiles in the master bedroom and the authentic barn wood door to Corey’s office that Mike found in the Upper Peninsula.
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