Birmingham neighbors up in arms over plans for 'extreme' home
Mike Wilkinson / The Detroit News

Birmingham — Linda Dresner is a purveyor of style well-known in the fashion centers of Europe and Manhattan. Her eponymous Birmingham boutique commands attention — and sometimes a small fortune — for its clothes from world-famous designers.

But Dresner, who can count socialite Gloria Vanderbilt, actress Scarlett Johansson and the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis among her customers, is facing questions about her taste. Not about her store's wares, but on the multimillion-dollar concrete cube home she wants to build in Birmingham.

It is stark.

Minimalist.

Modern.

"Silent," the home's architect, Steven Sivak, calls it.

And controversial.

"It's so extreme that we could not approve it," said James Mirro, a neighbor who has tried, unsuccessfully, to block the 7,200-square-foot home with poured concrete walls, calling it incompatible with a neighborhood filled with more traditional homes made of wood, brick and stone.

In a not-so-neighborly battle over sensibilities and aesthetics, a famous fashion maven was pitted against a collection of the well-to-do worried about the future of their neighborhood. It was a battle waged over e-mails, neighborhood chats and, ultimately, in the courts.

But beauty, in this case, will be in the eye of the building permit holder. That would be Dresner, renowned in the fashion world for — not surprisingly — embracing a minimalist vibe in her approach to high-fashion retail at her store on Maple Road in Birmingham. She was doing it long before it became de rigueur in Manhattan.

"I cannot tell you how groundbreaking it was in the fashion world," said Cathy Horyn, fashion critic for the New York Times. She met Dresner in the late 1980s when Horyn was the fashion writer for The Detroit News. "She's been a trailblazer in fashion and in the way fashion is sold."

Soon, Dresner Properties LLC, the official owner of the land, is expected to get the necessary approval to demolish the last home standing on the two lots on Shirley Road in the Birmingham neighborhood of Coryell Park. It paid more than $1.5 million for two existing homes. A city official said he expects to issue a building permit for the new construction shortly. By summer's end, Dresner and her husband Ed Levy, president of a private construction materials company, will likely have their home.

"Where I am, at this point, is: 'I can get used to it,'" next-door-neighbor Bruce Van Voorhis, a retired Ford product development manager said last week. He admits it will take time, though: the wall of the Dresner home facing his property will run roughly 100 feet and have just four windows. "It's starkly different than the rest of the neighborhood."
'Big, white, giant ice cube'

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