Reporter's Dream: A Mansion Straight Out Of 'Please Don't Eat the Daisies'

There was something romantic about the 1960's movie and TV show Please Don't Eat the Daisies. In the film, Doris Day and her husband, played by David Niven, move into a suburban mansion/castle with their four children and their giant dog — and comedy breaks out.

In the film, Niven works for a newspaper. And that brings up a question: In today's world, where could a newspaper (or radio) reporter pick up a mansion/castle?

Detroit.

That's where a nearly 10,000-square-foot house and estate called Stone Hedge is now up for sale — for under $450,000. As the Detroit Free Press reported over the weekend, it's "the historic Boston-Edison residence of Walter O. Briggs ... [who] gained prominence supplying auto bodies to the fledgling car industry in the early 1900s though his company Briggs Manufacturing. ... He also owned the Detroit Tigers from 1920 until his death in 1952."

Designed in 1915, the mansion has "11 bedrooms, seven bathrooms and nine fireplaces on more than an acre" of land, the Freep adds. (Click here for a selection of photos if you want to see what Stone Hedge looks like inside and out.)

My colleague Steve Henn, who covers the tech business for NPR in Silicon Valley, points out that for the same amount of money, you would only get a 1,200-square-foot condo in Mountain View, Calif.

And for a comparable home elsewhere, you could pay $15 million.

To be clear, the average home price in 2011 in Detroit was $97,800 — below the Midwest average that hovers around $120,000. Houses like this don't go on sale that often.

Maybe if I got a bunch of roommates, I could make my Please Don't Eat the Daises dream a reality. Doris Day is still putting out albums. She could come stay at the estate in Detroit.

Ms. Day, if you read this: You could have a whole wing to yourself!

[Sonari Glinton is an NPR correspondent based in Detroit.]

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