Architecture and Design: What Furniture Money Built

The turning point was an exhibition in another state. In 1876 the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition gathered the best manufacturers in America, and the East Coast trade assumed fine furniture came from Europe or from New England. Grand Rapids sent its best bedroom suites. Berkey & Gay, Phoenix Furniture and Nelson, Matter & Co. all came home with awards, and the phrase "Furniture City" stopped being a local boast.

What the makers did next is the genuinely clever part. In December 1878 they opened their showrooms directly to buyers from out of town, cutting out the eastern middlemen. That became the Grand Rapids Furniture Market, held in January and again in summer, and for roughly half a century the buyers for America's department stores came here twice a year to decide what the country would be sitting on. A mid-sized Michigan city set the national taste in furniture from a series of trade showrooms.

You can see the physical residue of that on the west side and in Monroe North, where the surviving factory buildings have been converted into offices, apartments and brewery taprooms. The brick, the timber posts, the freight-door openings and the sawtooth roof lights are all still legible if you know to look for them.

The Grand Rapids Public Museum tells this story properly on its second floor, with more than two thousand pieces of furniture held as industrial history rather than as decorative art: the machines, the wages and the workforce alongside the finished sideboards.

Frank Lloyd Wright built this house in 1908 and 1909 for Meyer S. May, a Grand Rapids clothier, and his wife Sophie Amberg. It is a Prairie house of the good period, low and horizontal, with art glass, built-in furniture and a plan that pulls you sideways through the rooms rather than straight down a hall.

What makes it exceptional is not the design, it is the restoration. Steelcase bought the house in 1985 after decades of alterations and put it back, with a thoroughness that included recreating textiles and light fittings from photographs and drawings. The furniture company that restored a house designed to have every piece of furniture built into it is the most Grand Rapids sentence in this guide.

And it is free. There is no charge to tour it, which is a decision Steelcase made and has kept. At the time of writing, tours ran on Tuesdays and Thursdays through the late morning and on Sunday afternoons, with a short film about the restoration followed by a docent-led walk through the house. Allow about ninety minutes for the whole thing.

Book. Reservations are taken online for parties of up to eight and by contact form for larger groups, and the house is small enough that turning up unannounced on a Sunday is a gamble. Practical notes: wheelchair access covers the visitor centre and the main floor, the upper floors are reached by stairs only, strollers are not allowed inside, and the house closes in winter when local schools close for weather. Confirm the current schedule before you plan a day around it, because these details do change.

Heritage Hill rises immediately east of downtown and holds roughly thirteen hundred houses dating from 1844 onwards, which makes it one of the largest urban historic districts in the United States. Nearly every style American architecture has produced is represented somewhere on these streets: Greek Revival, Italianate, Queen Anne, Romanesque, Colonial Revival, Arts and Crafts, Prairie.

This was where the furniture families lived, and the houses are the direct physical evidence of what that industry earned. The scale of them on Madison, College and Cherry is genuinely startling for a city this size.

Two hundred yards up College Avenue from the Meyer May House stands the Amberg House of 1910, commissioned by Sophie May's parents. Its authorship is a good puzzle: the design began with Wright, but he left for Europe during the project and it was carried through by Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin, two of the most interesting architects of the period in their own right. It is a private residence. Look from the pavement and do not knock.

The neighbourhood association runs a house tour, traditionally on a weekend in spring, which is the only way most visitors get inside anything here other than the May house. Dates and format change year to year, so check rather than assume.

The walk from the top of Heritage Hill down Cherry Street into the East Hills and Wealthy Street business districts takes about ten minutes and is the best single stretch of pavement in the city.