Ives Woods

A soap fortune, a hilltop and twenty lots

The name is Marvin A. Ives, a Detroit soap manufacturer born in that city in 1859 to a family with long ties to Ann Arbor. He built a 28-room Georgian house on a hilltop in ten acres of large trees, finished about 1914, and moved in the next year. He commuted to Detroit to run the soap business and eventually sold it to Procter and Gamble. The house still stands at 1808 Hermitage Road, and the road takes its name from the estate: The Hermitage.

In 1923 the ground around the mansion was platted as the M.A. Ives Subdivision, twenty lots recorded with the City of Ann Arbor. The houses that fill it now were built between 1922 and 1975, which is why a walk through Ives Woods reads as a half-century of Ann Arbor domestic architecture on one hill rather than a single period. The recorded plats around it are the ones that fill in the rest of the neighborhood as buyers use the name: Scottwood, Fenwood, Buell, University Heights and Brockman Boulevard Hills, with the Tuomy plats along Washtenaw to the east.

The homes

Older canopy and wider lots than the Burns Park grid are the two things you notice first, and both follow from the estate origins. The ground was wooded when Ives bought it, and the subdivision kept the trees; lots here were drawn for a country gentleman's neighbors rather than for a streetcar suburb, so houses sit farther apart and farther back than they do two blocks toward the park.

The 1920s and 1930s houses are the neighborhood's core: brick and stucco Colonial Revivals, Tudors and the occasional Georgian, built for faculty and professional families at a time when this was the edge of town. The 1950s through mid-1970s houses that completed the streets are larger-footprint ranches and two-stories on the remaining lots, some of them architect-designed, in the same period that produced Ann Arbor Hills' mid-century stock across Washtenaw.

That range means two houses a few doors apart can be forty years apart in systems and construction. A 1926 house and a 1968 house in Ives Woods share a street, a school and a canopy, and almost nothing behind the walls.

Not Lower Burns Park, not North Burns Park, not Ann Arbor Hills

Burns Park is usually described as two areas, and Ives Woods is a third that borrows the name. Lower Burns Park sits toward Packard, Dewey, State and Stadium on the original grid with its service alleys and rear garages. North Burns Park occupies the ground between Hill, Washtenaw, Ferdon, Granger and Forest, closest to campus, with a higher share of rental conversions. Ives Woods is northeast of the park, on the slope toward Washtenaw and Stadium, on larger lots, and the Ann Arbor Observer's neighborhood guide singles it out as having one of the highest median household incomes in the city.

Across Washtenaw Avenue the ground becomes Ann Arbor Hills, where the lots run to half an acre and more, the mid-century architecture is the draw, and the assigned schools change. Buyers use the three names interchangeably and overpay or under-comp as a result. The fix is to price at the block level: same side of Washtenaw, same decade, same lot pattern.

Parks, campus and the Arb

Burns Park itself is the neighborhood's front yard: fifteen acres of ball fields, tennis and pickleball courts, a playground and the Ann Arbor Senior Center, a few minutes' walk down the slope. Nichols Arboretum is a short walk northeast across Washtenaw, and the University's Central Campus, Michigan Stadium and the South University district are all within the range people here routinely cover on foot or by bicycle.

Washtenaw Avenue is the arterial: east to US-23 and Arborland, west into campus and downtown. East Stadium Boulevard runs south to the stadium and I-94. Both roads carry heavy traffic on football Saturdays, which is a fact of life on this side of town rather than a defect.

Schools

Ives Woods is served by Ann Arbor Public Schools. Elementary assignment splits inside the neighborhood between Burns Park Elementary, beside the park, and Angell Elementary, toward campus, by block. From there the immediate Burns Park area goes to Tappan Middle School on East Stadium Boulevard, and then to Huron High or Pioneer High depending on the address.

Buying or selling in Ives Woods

Comp at the block level. With low turnover and a fifty-year build range, there is rarely a recent sale that matches on era, lot and side of Washtenaw at once. Work from a wider time window, hold the neighborhood boundary firmly against portal maps that pool Burns Park, and adjust for decade before adjusting for anything else.

For a buyer, match the inspection to the house's decade. The 1920s houses carry the questions of their era: knob-and-tube wiring where it was never replaced, galvanized steel supply pipe, lead paint, asbestos in insulation, floor tile and pipe wrap, and clay or Orangeburg sewer laterals. The 1960s and early-1970s houses carry aluminum branch wiring and first-generation systems long past their lives. In every case, permitted additions matter: houses on lots this size have been added to, and the permit history is the record of how well.

For a seller, the case is the one the neighborhood makes for itself. Name Ives Woods, not Burns Park; name the decade and the architect where there is one; document what has been renewed; and lead with the canopy and the lot, which are the two things the grid two blocks west cannot offer.

Not to be confused with

• Burns Park · Ann Arbor
• Ann Arbor Hills · Ann Arbor
• Angell · Ann Arbor
• Tuomy Hills · Ann Arbor