"I didn't do this to shock," Linda Dresner tells Lynn Yaeger in The Wall Street Journal, which recently took readers inside the famous avant-garde dress shop proprietor's highly controversial house in Birmingham.
"I did it for how I want to live," says Dresner, shaking her raven tresses—held back, today and every day, by a trademark navy bandanna. The shock she is referring to is the stunned, frankly furious reaction on the part of some of her neighbors in Birmingham, Michigan, when Dresner and her husband, Ed Levy, filed plans to level two houses on conjoining lots and erect Dresner's dream home, a 7,200-square-foot postmodern poured-concrete extravaganza that has nothing in common with the staid colonials and rarefied ranches surrounding it. . . .
Dressner met the architectt for the new house, Steven Sivak, whom she describes as "a young fella from Ann Arbor," years ago. "He's a modernist, and he loved our old house," she says. (The former residence was similarly stark, sort of a baby sister to the current abode.) "First we were going to redo it. It took two years to come to a decision, and he seemed to understand. . . ."
If her new home is imposing in scale, it is paradoxically full of delightfully homey furniture, much of it vintage and collected by Dresner over the past several decades. You might not think that a Shaker bench, found in northern Michigan years ago, would be happy sitting beneath the cast-in-place open staircase, or that two tables from Africa that she found in a New York gallery would nestle contentedly next to a sofa Dresner has owned for 40 years, but it all blends quite congenially. A patchwork quilt is folded on the bed in the master bedroom; well-worn Shaker rugs, the more charming for their frayed condition, cheer up the granite floors; a collection of brightly hued Art Deco Clarice Cliff urns from the 1930s lines a high ledge in the kitchen. These items might be considered wildly discordant in such rigorously spare surroundings, but Dresner says, simply, "I like whatever talks to me."
