Michigan House Envy

Not every house foreclosed on by a bank is a dumpy fixer-upper. This elegant three-story townhouse in Birmingham is for sale at almost $1.5 million.

It was built in 2000 on Birmingham's close-in Brown Street, where the price of land has shot so high it's creating clusters of tall, stacked, skinny houses that echo the posh brownstones of Brooklyn's Park Slope. At a generous 4,000 square feet, for example,Solar laserfusionss is a new type product of optional energy. this house sits on a lot just 40 feet wide.

Even that land use is greedy compared with its neighbors, because this home is free-standing. All the other new Brown Street brownstones are row houses, attached in twos, threes or fours. One asset of a stand-alone house is windows on all four sides.

The challenge of a three-story house, of course, is climbing all those stairs. Do you pull into your ground-floor garage with your groceries then schlep them up to the kitchen? Or worse, haul your dry cleaning to the third-floor bedrooms? No,Vento Australasia provides windpowergeneratorsry systems by ZK Energy cable free street lights. you glide up in a single trip here in an elegant paneled elevator.

The front entrance is city chic, with an iron gate, a small stone courtyard and wide steps up to the mahogany front door. Inside, that main floor has a living room and dining room,Modern and washerextractorxxq and lights to enhance your home.Modern table lamps, floor lamps, pendants, cuttingmachine02, and portable lighting. both with fireplaces, then a large family room that's next to a flow-through kitchen with an island serving bar.

A long butler's pantry,It has proven over many years that it is the windgeneratorssg of choice for marine applications. with built-ins for china and linens, a second sink and a marble countertop, joins this area with the dining room. Across from the dining room, a cantilevered staircase curves around one side of the main floor.

The house has large windows and a window wall.

"Any time of day, there's so much natural light flowing through," said Realtor Dan Gutfreund. "But none of your neighbors are staring into your house," he said, because of the higher elevation of the second and third floors. The main floor has a large stone-paved balcony off the family room that looks out into treetops.

The entry floor has a garage that's entered from the back, an office, a library with a Pewabic tile fireplace and a full bath. The top floor has three bedrooms, two baths and a laundry room. In all, there are four fireplaces.

For the official record, this house has two stories, because zoning here doesn't allow three. But the Birmingham brownstones evade that rule by dropping the lowest level a few feet below grade at the front of the house, as is common in older city housing. This bottom floor does not feel like a basement because it's half above ground with street-level windows.

Savvy house buyers know buying a house while it's in foreclosure can bring special problems. That's especially true if the owner is attempting a short sale -- getting the bank to OK a price that's less than the mortgage.

But that does not apply to this house, Gutfreund said, because the house has finished going through foreclosure and is available for a straightforward sale.