This home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, went viral 10 years ago when it was first put on sale. Nothing unusual on the outside, but once you stepped inside you couldn’t miss the 2300 pipe organ. “Wait a minute, how do you fit an organ inside a house?” I hear you ask. Well, the organ pipes cover more than 1/3 of it.
The owner himself, who passed away at age 72, couldn’t play the musical instrument, but it was his childhood dream to have one. So he hired some experts who completed the installation over a period of 5 and a half years.
Every pipe is one note at the keyboard and according to the installers this organ is larger than most church organs.1Since the owner couldn’t play it himself, he hosted events with people who could.
When this house became viral in 2014, the organ was valued at around 1 million dollars. The house itself was on sale for around $130,000.
Even though we don’t know the closing price, the house was finally sold in 2015 to David Luttinen, a retired bus driver and a hobbyist organ players for 47 years at the time. “My intention is to keep the instrument exactly as it is today, keep Guy and Don involved in its maintenance, and continue to have concerts by the AGO (American Guild of Organists),” said David.
According to a YouTube comment from 6 years ago the new owner kept their promise,
The new owner is open for visitors to come out and play. Also, the pipe chamber rooms is an addition to the home and was constructed specifically for the organ. The rooms can be converted to bedrooms if the organ is to be removed. Also, the organ room addition is built into a small hill. So you don’t hear a whole lot out side of the home.
I did some research, and even though the size of this organ is massive in the context of a house , it’s not that groundbreakingly large. For example the Domkyrka in Lund has an organ with 7074 pipes and the largest organ in Europe, inside the St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Passau, Germany has a staggering 17,974 pipes. I can’t put a footnote within a footnote, but I can’t keep this info for myself: Just to understand the range of the organ in St. Stephen’s Cathedral, its largest pipe is over 11 meters long and weighs over 306 kilograms, while the smallest pipes are just six millimeters.↩