Aretha Franklin House (The Rose Estate)

She could have bought anywhere, and in fact she already had — her primary house was out in Bloomfield Hills. But when Aretha Franklin wanted a Detroit sanctuary, she bought this one: a 1927 Tudor Revival at the end of a private drive in Palmer Woods, backing onto the Detroit Golf Club. Roughly 5,600 square feet of stone arches and carved wood, five chimney stacks, a great hall with 28-foot ceilings that takes light from both ends. She named it the Rose Estate and threaded roses through the whole thing — rose carpet, rose chandeliers, the famous rose-red tub — and she was living here when she cut A Rose Is Still a Rose, the 1998 album whose title track a 22-year-old Lauryn Hill wrote and produced for her.

The house had a queen before her. Patricia Hill Burnett — portrait artist, former Miss Michigan, and one of Michigan’s most consequential feminists — lived here first, in a house her father-in-law built in 1927. Burnett was the first woman to take a studio at the all-male Scarab Club and a founder of the International Women’s Forum, and by several accounts Aretha bought the place partly because it had been hers. Two women who threw legendary parties, in the same rooms, sixty years apart.

Then the hard part. After Aretha’s death in 2018 the house went dark — boarded windows, burst boiler pipes, water damage, raccoons in the walls — and her estate let it go for $300,000. The couple who bought it in 2023 have since put more than $2 million into a multi-stage restoration, and crucially chose to restore rather than renovate: the slate roof, the original windows, her red piano and pink bedroom set, and some 600 Burnett family documents found tucked away inside. They chronicle all of it at @roseestatedetroit, which is the only place to watch it happen in real time.

And now the correction this house is the right place to make: Aretha Franklin was never a Motown artist. Berry Gordy tried — he came after her and her sister Erma for his fledgling Tamla label around 1960, and her father, Rev. C.L. Franklin, turned him down for being unproven, betting on Columbia and legendary talent scout John Hammond instead. So she spent six polished, frustrating years singing standards in New York while her Detroit friends piled up hits back home. It took Atlantic, Jerry Wexler, and a room full of Muscle Shoals musicians in 1967 to finally let her be herself — and then “Respect” went and rearranged the culture. She was the first woman ever inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, in 1987. Motown is a label. Aretha is the city. Not the same thing, and she’s on our Motown tour precisely so we can say so.

Start where the voice started, at her father’s house on LaSalle. End at Woodlawn, where she rests. Let this one be the middle — the house she bought for herself, when she’d already proved she didn’t have to stay.