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    "headline": "Aretha Franklin’s Detroit Rose Estate, sold for $300,000 in 2018, is trending again after its restoratio",
    "description": "Trevor Thomas and Brandon Lynum bought the 1927 Tudor in 2023; Preservation Detroit named it its residential project of the year in November 2025.",
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    "keywords": "Aretha Franklin, Detroit, Historic homes, Rose Estate",
    "articleBody": "A story about Aretha Franklin’s former house beside the Detroit Golf Club is circulating widely again this week, but the restoration it describes is not new. Trevor Thomas and Brandon Lynum bought the 1927 Tudor Revival known as the Rose Estate in 2023, and reports in December 2024 put their spending on it at more than $2 million. The most recent milestone came in November 2025, when the nonprofit group Preservation Detroit named the house its Residential Preservation Project of the Year. Thomas credited “more than 50 artisans, specialists, and preservation experts” for the work in a post on the house’s own account. The couple live there, and they have been clear about their intentions: “We’ve been asked if our intent is to sell after restoration: ahh, no.” They have also said they plan to put a preservation easement on the property so that future owners have to keep its history intact. Three households in nearly a century The owners describe themselves as “just the third residents” to make the house a primary home since it was built. The first was the Burnett family; Rebecca Burnett, whose great-grandparents built the place, attended the 2025 award evening. The family member most closely tied to it is Patricia Hill Burnett, whose father-in-law built it: a society portrait painter who in 1962 became the first woman to hold a studio at Detroit’s Scarab Club and who launched the Michigan chapter of the National Organization for Women in 1969. Franklin bought the house from Burnett in 1993, as an admirer of both her painting and her activism. Some accounts date her arrival to March 1994. It was never her only address; her primary residence was in Bloomfield Hills. She gave the Tudor its name, adding rose motifs throughout with interior designer Barbara Kopitz, and she had Kohler color-match a rose-red soaking tub for the primary suite. The house later slipped. Franklin nearly lost it over unpaid property taxes in 2008, according to reports at the time of its sale, and in her final years it was boarded up while she lived elsewhere. After her death in August 2018, her estate sold it that October for $300,000 to Michigan developer Anthony Kellum of Kellum Mortgage, who said it had stood empty for 10 years and needed “major renovations to restore its original beauty.” By January 2023 it was back on the market at $975,000, with the listing warning that the home “requires major renovation.” Franklin’s Detroit years and the house, in order 1927: the house is built on the edge of the Detroit Golf Club. Late 1940s: by the time Aretha is five, her father, C. L. Franklin, has moved the family to Detroit to lead New Bethel Baptist Church. 1982: after years in New York and Los Angeles, she returns to the Detroit area to help care for her father, who dies in July 1984. 1993: she buys the Rose Estate. 1994: she receives Kennedy Center Honors and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. 1998: she releases A Rose Is Still a Rose, made during her years at the house. 2008: the house is nearly lost over back taxes. June 8, 2017: Detroit renames part of Madison Street as Aretha Franklin Way. August 16, 2018: Franklin dies at 76 at her apartment in Riverfront Towers, Detroit. October 2018: the estate sells the house for $300,000. 2023: Thomas and Lynum buy it and begin restoring it. November 2025: the preservation award. What $2 million bought Set against the sale prices, the restoration spending is large. More than $2 million is over six and a half times the $300,000 the estate accepted in 2018 ($2,000,000 ÷ $300,000 ≈ 6.7), and roughly double the $975,000 asking price of 2023. The owners have not published an itemized total; the $2 million number comes from reporting on their 2024 tours. The owners’ own inventory explains where much of the effort went. They say about 95 percent of the house is original, including inch-thick slate roof tiles, copper gutters, steel casement windows set in limestone, wide red oak floorboards, Pewabic tile in the bathrooms and 1920s door hardware stamped Yale New York. Their first post on the project called it “restoration (versus renovation which Trevor detests).” By late 2024 the couple had finished the first phase of what they expected to be a five-year project; the slate roof, the third floor and a basement gutted by water damage were still to come. The kitchen has since been repainted in what they describe as Franklin’s favorite blue. The house now works as part museum, part event space. Museum-style placards tell the house’s story, photos and memorabilia line the walls, and more than two dozen nonprofits have held events there; for the 2024 holiday season alone, the couple said they prepared for more than 450 visitors at events supporting local charities. Franklin’s niece, Sabrina Owens, borrowed the 1998 album title for her verdict: “A rose is still a rose because of Trevor and Brandon.” The next date on the calendar is the house’s own. It turns 100 in 2027, with the owners saying that nearly all of its original fabric is still in place. More on the singer’s career is on her reference page, and on Patricia Hill Burnett, who sold the house to Franklin, here. Further reading Wikipedia: Aretha Franklin Wikipedia: Patricia Hill Burnett Image: Cecilio Ricardo, U.S. Air Force, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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