Edward Campbell House (Campbell-Hays), 1899

1555 Washtenaw Avenue

Edward Campbell House (Campbell-Hays), 1899
Creator: Kahn, Albert, 1869-1942

This Georgian Revival style house was built in 1899 for Edward DeMille Campbell, a distinguished professor of chemistry at the University of Michigan and Director of the Chemical Laboratories. Campbell's father, Judge James Valentine Campbell, was the first Dean of the University of Michigan Law School and later became one of the first Supreme Court Justices in Michigan. Edward and his wife Jennie, sister of industrialist Marvin Ives, had originally lived at 1310 Hill Street, just a few blocks away. After a chemical explosion blinded Campbell in 1892, his architect, Albert Kahn of the firm of Nettleton, Kahn and Trowbridge, altered the Hill Street house to help him get around more easily. Many of these ideas were later used in the Washtenaw house. According to Emil Lorch, Director of the University of Michigan College of Architecture, this home was the first designed by Kahn after his firm was organized.

The house, with its red brick and white trim, its strict symmetry, its central entry, end chimneys, and dormers, has fine interior woodwork, wide stairways and a panelled study. Nearly all the original details remain including porcelain keyholes and door handles and marble bathroom fixtures. It is one of the few houses Kahn designed in Ann Arbor and the only one with both the exterior and interior intact.

When Campbell and his wife died their six children inherited the house in equal shares: In 1929, daughter Mary and her husband James Griffith Hays moved in. Significant renovations were made including replacing the wiring and plumbing though great care was taken to preserve the original interiors and the design created for her blind father. The Hays lived here until their deaths when again several family members inherited the property jointly. Unable to buy each other out, yet concerned that new owners not destroy the house or convert it to another use, the heirs worked to establish the Washtenaw Hill Historic District. In 1980 Robert and Holde Borcherts purchased it and thoroughly renovated it.