Saint Clare

Twenty-five minutes from downtown Detroit there are streets where the canal runs behind the house and the boat is tied up where anybody else would put a garden. Saturday morning in July the whole block goes out at once. And somewhere past all of it, out on the shipping channel, a thousand-foot freighter slides across the horizon hauling ore and stone down from the north country — close enough to watch from a lawn chair, doing an entirely different kind of work.

Saint Clare is named for that water — the shallow one between Huron and Erie that people around Detroit call the sixth Great Lake. It is one of two Castle cuts we make: large, irregular, dimensional pieces with the depth of full-bed masonry. It does not read as a surface applied to a house. It reads as structure.

Which matters most on a street where the houses face each other. Saint Clare has presence from the road — the kind of stone somebody registers from the car without being able to say why. Specify it on entries, on full elevations, and anywhere a house is meant to still look right when the trees have grown in.