The Builder & the Castle

Aug. 6, 2003

When the new owners of Castle Farms decided to rebuild the peaks, towers and great halls of their crumbling French chateaux in Charlevoix, one name surfaced as the man who could do the job of restoring the past: that of Petoskey builder Larry Shawn.
“I‘d been looking at the Castle for years and it was always a fantasy to rebuild it,“ Shawn says during a tour of the historic buildings and grounds. Today, after a year-and-a-half of intensive work involving crews of up to 30 carpenters, masons, electricians, plumbers and tile setters, the Castle has reopened as a wedding, convention and event center. Shawn strolls the grounds with the lighthearted step of a man who knows that a 10-year-plan to bring Castle Farms back to its original glory is well along the way. “We probably did five years work in the year-and-a-half we spent here,“ he notes.
Some 80 years ago, this was the world-famous showcase farm of the Sears-Roebuck Company, built by its president, A.H. Loeb in 1918. At that time, Sears was heavily invested in selling farm products to families via its renowned catalogs which circulated throughout rural America.
“The farm was used to demonstrate all of Sears‘ products,“ Shawn says. “They had everything you can imagine for farming and the home. This was acre-for-acre the most productive farm in the world with the biggest crop yields per acre and champion cows producing the most milk.“

CASTLE FOR COWS
Although the largest building on the property looks like it could be an elegant mansion, it was actually a horse barn through the 1920s, and part of the “castle“ portion with its turrets and stone walls was the home of cows, rather than nobility. Here in the courtyard, an artesian well once slaked the thirst of cattle and their tenders. In its heyday, there was a sprawling carriage house with six gleaming buggies waiting to be driven into town by the grooms who lived upstairs. Today, the horse and cow barns are used for wedding receptions as well as one of the most popular prom destinations in Northern Michigan.
Of note, the Loeb family home is said to dwarf the buildings of the farm. It is located some distance off near the shores of Lake Charlevoix, and visitors are not encouraged.
Castle Farms was purchased by the Mueller family of Mississippi a couple of years ago. The Muellers own RPM Pizza, Inc., which has a chain of 162 Domino‘s Pizza stores. Linda Mueller, who vacationed in Northern Michigan in the mid-‘60s, has a fascination with castles and visits 20-30 of them per year around the world. When she learned that the French chateaux-style Castle Farms of her childhood memories was up for sale, it was a temptation impossible to resist.
Prior to Mueller‘s ownership, Castle Farms had fallen on hard times and decades of neglect. The local 4-H Club attempted to make a go of it, but didn‘t have the resources. And many here in the region recall the days of the early ‘80s when The Castle hosted some 90 concerts, drawing bands from all over the world, but again, not enough dollars to restore the place. By the time the Muellers got the property, the roofs of the castle towers had collapsed, several wings had been knocked down, window frames had rotted away and there was extensive water damage going back for decades.

A MAN WITH RESOURCES
That‘s when Larry Shawn entered the picture.
Born and raised in Detroit, Shawn, 53, of Lazer Construction, has been in the building trades for the past 35 years.
“I started when I was 18, working with artisans whose specialty was Old World construction methods,“ he recalls. “The people I worked with were all from Europe and they taught me patience and the value of doing things the right way the first time around. It was something that affected my whole life. I learned from great Scandinavian craftsmen.“
One mentor in particular was Jule Jules, a Norweigian whom Shawn worked with in the Seattle area during the ‘70s. “He was just a wizard. He could take a piece of wood and turn it into anything. We worked in downtown Seattle restoring old buildings and then in downtown Detroit.“
Shawn‘s big break as a builder came when he had a chance to restore a huge, 60-year-old camp of 70 structures in Algonquin Provincial Park in northern Ontario. It was a 10-year project restoring everything from a 10,000-square-foot lodge to 200-square-foot cabins. Building supplies had to be floated by barge across a lake to the remote site. “You learn to be resourceful in a situation like that,“ he notes.
“I spent a couple of winters there pretty much alone,“ he says. “All I did was work, read, write, and watch videos. I used to go into the town of Hunstville once every two or three weeks and rent a bunch of videos. They knew I was out at the camp and let me take a bunch of movies at a time.“
After his Algonquin project, Shawn was hired to restore Camp Tenuga in Kalkaska, where he built an 8,000-square-foot lodge. He and his wife B.J. were living in Detroit at the time, but the work was so intense that B.J. started making more and more trips up north. They fell in love with the Petoskey area and moved here seven years ago. Today, B.J. is co-owner of Bearcub Outfitters.

TAKING ON THE CASTLE
Shawn was working on a number of homes and remodeling projects in Charlevoix when he landed the Castle job.
“I felt very excited, honored and fortunate to be able to work here,“ he says. “I think that anyone who had any hand in restoring the Castle felt the same way. There‘s a great deal of pride among the local contractors. Everyone who‘s a local here has some sort of memory of the Castle -- either they had a family member who worked here, or they were here for a concert.“
Local builders worked in the footsteps of giants. When Castle Farms was built in 1918, over 100 stone masons were brought over from Europe. The original masons worked with indigenous stone raked from the fields of local farms, creating intricate patterns in the stone towers.
Despite that foundation of craftsmanship, Shawn and his crews had an arduous task recreating the past. All of the conical roofs of the towers had to be lifted, for instance, to rebuild their rotten wooden understructures. Then, the roofs themselves had to be either restored or rebuilt based on plans and drawings nearly a century old. There were similar challenges restoring old windows. Mueller wanted as much of the original woodwork saved as possible, so the builders gleaned every possible remnant, grafting new wood to window frames and doors where the old had dissolved to nothing.

GOING IT ALONE
You might imagine that Shawn has a huge staff for such undertakings, but in fact, his Lazer Construction is a one man show.
“I do my own bookwork, scheduling of trades, pricing of jobs and running the jobs and I like it that way,“ he says. “I get the best guys in the area in all of the trades to work on a project and I save people money. I try to save as much as possible on construction management and have very low overhead.“
The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. And at Castle Farms, it‘s clear that Shawn has wrought a small miracle, bringing the property back as a working business. Over the next few years, renovations will continue on what‘s turning into a major attraction. Already, the project‘s Great Hall is seating up to 500 people, with its east brick courtyard seating 300, and a tavern seating 70.
Larry Shawn isn‘t resting on his laurels with the completion of the first phase of the Castle, however. In fact, he‘s anticipating a new large project this fall at Michigania, the U-M Alumni Association retreat on Walloon Lake. He‘ll be constructing a new nature center on the 360-acre parcel, which enjoys 6,000 feet of frontage on the lake. “It‘s a pretty ambitious project,“ he notes. Fortunately, he‘s had lots of practice on ambitious projects.