Judy Rose

Special to the Detroit Free Press

The grand, white Mediterranean Revival home that S.S Kresge built on Boston Boulevard will be listed for sale next weekend for the first time in 25 years.

At more than 20,000 square feet, it’s one of Detroit’s largest mansions, and it sits on what’s believed to be the city’s largest residential lot — almost four acres, wrapped with a decorative iron fence.

What’s more, the 1914 mansion, designed by the Cleveland firm of Meade and Hamilton, is in excellent condition. For the past 25 years, owners with both the means and the energy have been restoring the mansion and its grounds. They are Roland and Jeanne Radinski.

The house is wide, and a long elegant hall runs down the center. Across the front is the living room, then the music room, the grand entrance, the dining room, the breakfast room, and finally a large solarium. It’s furnished with Oriental rugs and antiques.

The back of the house has rooms for staff — a kitchen, the butler’s pantry and the staff dining room, now used as an office. The kitchen — unusually large and sunny for its era — has been restored with new counters, floors and appliances, but kept in the original style.

Roland Radinski thought the house had 13 bedrooms till he counted a new set of floorplans recently. Oops — make that 14. Bathrooms number nine, fireplaces 10, indoor fountains two, large outdoor fountains one.

Two carriage houses are in back, each with a two-bedroom apartment. There’s a walk-in safe in the basement and a large hidden room on the third floor.

Two current rooms started out open — just floors, pillars and roofs. But the Kresges divorced in 1929, and Anna Kresge enclosed those and added lavish decorations. Now they are a billiards room and a conservatory, both with harlequin marble floors.

Each fireplace is different; ceiling and wall decorations are lavish and have been restored by the owners and experts. Among all the elegance is one funny, frugal touch.

Though very rich, Kresge, who developed one of the first five and dime stores, eventually Kmart, was known to be personally cheap. Next to the staff area an oak phone booth caries the sign “telephone.” Inside is a pay phone for the staff, who were forbidden to use the house phone.

Lovers of historic neighborhoods know the most prestigious houses are closest to the main street, in this case Woodward Avenue. Kresge’s house is the first off of Woodward and takes up two-thirds of that block. The next two mansions going west were designed by Albert Kahn for members of the B. Siegel family.

When they bought the house in 1993, “It looked like a bomb had gone off,” said Roland Radinski. Some ceilings had collapsed into rooms, their intricate details ruined.

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He hired and worked with restoration experts. “I bought that compound dentists use to make a mold of your teeth,” he said. Where the ceiling was intact he made molds. Experts rebuilt the pattern and stencilled the designs.

The marble floors had so many layers of gunk that they looked like linoleum, he said. He consulted a flooring expert, bought the right compounds, rented big brushes and stripped the marble.

The work especially shows in the yard, now like a four-acre park with a different outdoor room around each turn, outlined in trees, shrubs and hostas. There are hundreds of mature, leafy hostas here. For flowers, they’ve planted 30,000 bulbs.

There’s a three-room playhouse built for the five Kresge kids, and a structure labeled gazebo, more like a small model for the Acropolis with white pillars. Behind it, two lines of Doric pillars support a long pergola, recreated from pieces of the old.

Several koi ponds are scattered throughout, and in back are two cement ponds where the owner breeds koi. As a kid, Roland Radinski made money by breeding and selling fancy guppies.

One more fix is underway. Previous owners had obliterated detail in repairs of a huge chimney. Experts are on the roof now, building it back to original style.

S.S. Kresge mansion

Where: 70 W. Boston Blvd., Detroit

How much: $3.25 million

Bedrooms: 14

Baths: 6 full, 3 half in the main house, plus 4 bedrooms and two full baths in the carriage houses.

Key features: Spectacular S.S. Kresge mansion in the Boston Edison Historic district is for sale after a long period of restoration that kept the house close to original. Almost four acres of grounds are enclosed in an iron fence, landscaped like a park with koi ponds, structures and thousands of plants. Two carriage houses each have their own apartments.

Contact: Rob Smith, Keller Williams, 248-535-2548.