Henry Ford’s 56-room Dearborn mansion has sat mostly closed to the public for years, but the estate’s powerhouse, garage and grand home are now on track to reopen for tours and private events in 2027. The property along the Rouge River includes a hydroelectric powerhouse where Ford once ran generators alongside his friend Thomas Edison, an in-ground turntable for cars in the garage, and an underground tunnel where Ford tinkered on an experimental X engine.
Fair Lane Estate hosted a press tour of the grounds yesterday, giving reporters a look at the restoration’s progress, as reported by the Detroit Free Press. Devon O’Reilly, who became president and CEO of the nonprofit Fair Lane Estate in June 2025 to guide the final phases of restoration, told the paper that renovations have cost roughly $15 million to $18 million, funded mostly through private donations. The nonprofit, formally known as Henry Ford Estate Inc., took over stewardship of the property from the University of Michigan in 2013, according to background compiled by Lord Cultural Resources.
A House Built for Tinkering
The estate encompasses Henry and Clara Ford’s home along with its powerhouse and garage, according to the Free Press’s reporting. The 31,000-square-foot house has three levels and once housed an elevator that, in its original hydro-powered form, took 20 minutes to travel from top to bottom. Henry and Clara Ford lived at Fair Lane from 1915 until his death in 1947 and her death in 1950, after which the home was transferred to Ford Motor Co. and later became the company’s archives.
A 300-foot underground utility tunnel links the main residence to the powerhouse, carrying steam and electrical lines while doubling as a private passage where Ford kept an experimental workshop, according to the Michigan Economic Development Corporation. It was there, per the Free Press, that Ford designed his X engine. He also experimented with making plastics from soybeans elsewhere on the property. The garage still preserves an outlet once used to charge Clara Ford’s electric vehicle, and the powerhouse includes an in-ground turntable that once rotated cars for storage.
Edison’s Cornerstone and a Self-Sufficient Estate
Thomas Edison personally laid the cornerstone for the powerhouse, which harnessed the dammed Rouge River to generate hydroelectric power not just for the estate but for roughly 2,000 nearby Dearborn homes, according to the National Park Service, which designated Fair Lane a National Historic Landmark in November 1966. The federal designation cited the property’s association with Henry Ford under Criterion 2 and its Prairie Style landscape architecture under Criterion 4. Fair Lane was added to the National Register of Historic Places that same year, per the Free Press…