Yurt

Drivers heading west along I-96 near Fruitport may have encountered an unusual structure that could be mistaken for a pair of grain silos.

In reality, it’s a 2,914-square-foot, yurt-style home set on 23 acres that also include an organic hobby farm, woods and a pond.

Houston, Texas native Edward Grimm and his mother, Candace Grimm, on Aug. 2 listed the property they co-own in Crockery Township, four miles southeast of Fruitport, for $1,295,900.

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The largest structure on the property is the yurt-style house that Edward Grimm had custom built in December 2021 by Winthrop, Wash.-based prefabricated round home manufacturer, Smiling Wood Yurts.

The dwelling consists of two buildings, one 28 feet and one 24 feet tall, connected by a foyer. The two halves each contain main-floor living space and one main-floor bedroom, with one additional bedroom for each in second-story lofts. The home also features three full baths and one half-bath.

The Grimm family shares work experience in the Houston or Memphis, Tenn., oil industries. Edward Grimm worked as an oil trader before moving to Michigan. Candace worked in human resources and project management for a company that digitizes well logs. Edward Grimm Sr. was in the petroleum marine transportation industry before becoming president and CEO of Southern Towing Co., a commercial barge line that hauled liquid fertilizers until its acquisition in 2019.

When the younger Edward Grimm, now 43, retired because of health issues, he started an online clothing retail company. Since the work could be done from anywhere, he and his then-wife and their two children moved to Michigan to be close to her family.

Grimm bought the vacant parcel in Crockery Township in August 2020 for $109,000. He built on the land a barn, chicken coop, and a couple of geothermal greenhouses that, when combined with the farmland, allowed him to start growing tropical fruits for his family during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. Crops included kiwifruit, oranges, lemons, limes, mangos, bananas, passionfruit, jabuticaba, pitangatuba and cherry of the Rio Grande.

“We were thinking, ‘Well, we can’t get oranges at the grocery store,’ so I planted oranges,” he said, referring to the fruit shortages during pandemic lockdowns in some countries.

Grimm also added a pair of “high tunnels” — smaller and more mobile versions of a greenhouse that are open on both ends — for growing fruit and vegetables like tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers.

The 23-acre listing includes all of the outbuildings, the crops planted thus far, a pond and five acres of woods.

Grimm said he initially planned to build a “Mongolian-style man cave” on the property in the form of a fabric yurt. After his divorce, that dream soon morphed into a more serious plan: An actual house for him and his daughter and son, who were ages 15 and 20 at the time.

Describing himself as “eclectic,” even after he decided on a full-blown house, Grimm clung to the idea of constructing a yurt- or silo-shaped building.

“Part of the idea, as well, was that it kind of looked like (a silo) that you would see driving through farmland wherever in America,” he said.

In 2021, Grimm discovered Smiling Wood Yurts and ordered a prefab kit from the company for about $150,000.

“They have a variety of dimensions you can pick,” he said. “I told them I wanted … to make sure that when I was standing at my cooktop, that I could look directly out into the sky (through the glass skylight in the dome). I told them where I wanted bedrooms and bathrooms, and they put them all in.”

He said Smiling Wood Yurts produced the blueprint, fabricated the roofs, walls and trusses, and then shipped the shell of the house to Michigan.

Grimm worked with builder Tom Wittingen, of Hudsonville-based Elk Ridge LLC Construction & Land Management, to strategize on assembling the structure of the home and to refine the interior design.

“I have no building expertise,” Grimm said. “I have the design touch, the eye for what I wanted to build, and he told me what I could and couldn’t do.”

After it arrived, Grimm and Wittingen augmented the shell and added extra insulation to make it more energy efficient. He said the house has central air but he rarely needs to use it because the windows, which open from the bottom and swing upward, offer such great ventilation.

The ceilings of the house are all-natural, untreated spruce wood, so Grimm installed humidifiers to keep the wood from expanding and contracting seasonally.

Grimm said he could see the place potentially appealing to a couple of demographics: older retired couples who might want a hobby farm, or wealthy individuals from the Chicago-area looking for a second home that feels “like a Chicago penthouse” but has country acreage.

He loves sleek, contemporary lines that call to mind the mid-20th century, which ended up as his design starting point for the home.

“Back in the day, you would have these midcentury modern houses that had these weird angles everywhere, a kind of James Bond-type feel. So I felt like the decor should reflect something like that, that it would work well together,” he said.

The open-concept kitchen has GE Monogram appliances, some of which have glass fronts to echo the old style, quartz counters and black wood-veneer cabinetry.

Every piece of trim in the house had to be custom cut to fit the angles of the home. Grimm knew that he wanted a lot of walnut accents and furniture in the home, and even though wood was scarce during supply chain issues at the time, he lucked out and found a bulk load of walnut butcher block at a home improvement store.

“We bought almost a whole truckload, so all the tables, my bed, all the stair treads, all the nosings around the staircases, all the built-in benches are all built out of walnut butcher block,” he said.

Grimm bought some of the furniture — including the walnut-framed couch — from Kardiel, a brand that specializes in midcentury furnishings.

He said the listing doesn’t include the furniture, but he would consider selling the house furnished for a bit higher price — all except his antique liquor cabinet and his dresser, which a woman whom he hired to buy midcentury furniture found in one of the antique stores in the former Sligh Furniture factory off Century Avenue SW in Grand Rapids.

Because of the “weird angles” of the house, Grimm added a unique feature to the main-floor primary bedroom: an accordion rod in the walk-in closet that expands to hold more clothing.

He called the primary bath “state of the art,” with a luxurious steam shower, crushed granite tub and heated towel racks.

“I lived in London before, and one of the features that I missed the most when I (came back), was that all the flats there had heated towel racks, so your towel was always toasty after your shower.”

Also on the lower level, there’s a stacked LG washer and dryer set and a half-bath.

The other bedrooms are also well-appointed. The upstairs loft in the larger side of the house has a large bedroom with an attached bathroom and space for an office.

On the smaller side of the home, which almost feels like its own apartment, there’s a lower-level full bath, bunk room, family room/office area with a wet bar, and the fourth bedroom.

Grimm hopes whoever buys the farm will keep it running. When he established it, he called it Genesis Farms in honor of his Jewish heritage, and because it represented a new beginning for him. His vision was to create a “permaculture food forest” with no pesticides or harmful fertilizers.

The fruit trees aren’t yet grown to maturity — there have been a few lemons and limes produced but many of the plants are still around 10 inches tall and could take up to 10 more years to mature. Included with the farm is an 8-foot fence all the way around the property to protect the trees from deer as they grow.

Grimm said to him, the place feels homey, and there’s good potential for it to just keep getting better.

“Being able to get up in the morning, grab eggs, fruits and vegetables, make breakfast sitting at my table with the sun coming in my sunroof and in through the windows, and having breakfast that just came off my property is … just such a great feeling.

“I only hope the (buyers) appreciate it as much as me and my family.”

Grimm said he doesn’t have as many ties in Michigan as he used to. He hoped that his son would one day work the farm, but he would like to continue working in the hotel business in Muskegon instead.

Since his daughter, now 17, wants to attend college in Texas, he said the two of them plan to move back home, where he might return to the oil industry, or maybe do more house flips — he isn’t sure yet.

Either way, he said it won’t be easy to let go of this place after pouring his heart into it.

“Honestly, I have mixed emotions about the whole process (of selling),” he said. “When they came in to take pictures, I wanted to cry. It’s been my passion project.”

Grimm said he didn’t exactly save money by going the prefab route on the house. The list price for the farm is roughly set at his break-even point for the cost to build.

“If you just wanted to build a normal, everyday house without all the — let’s call them eccentricities — you could get in cheaper,” he said, referring to Smiling Wood Yurts.

But he said the experience was priceless, and he’s proud of the final product, calling it “something cool that I haven’t seen done before.”

“I think the pictures speak more than my words do. It’s just amazing,” he said.

Sandi Gentry, of the Sandi Gentry Team of Re/Max Lakeshore in Grand Haven, is Grimm’s broker for the listing.

She echoed what Grimm said: There aren’t any comparable homes anywhere that she’s aware of, so the price was set based on the value of the land and the cost to build the house and the outbuildings.

“It’s definitely a case of it’s just a totally unique property. It’s not only unique, they did a great job at everything that they’ve done. … There’s not too many farms that have a greenhouse that can be year-round,” she said.

“It’s really a farm-to-table organic farm and … a really, really nice home.”

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