BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. – If you're in the market for a new home and want to live like a queen, one of Aretha Franklin's homes inside a gated community in Bloomfield Hills just went on the market.
The first thing you'll notice about the six-bedroom, 5 1/2-bathroom home is the red piano from Franklin's Detroit home.
Interior designer Rodney Howell was hired to stage the home. He brought in all new furniture, using the piano as the center of the great room.
"This is the Queen of Soul's piano. Oh wow!" said Local 4’s Evrod Cassimy.
As for the kitchen:
"A lot of these things are original that Aretha Franklin used,” Howell said. “Whoever gets this stove -- they're going to be cooking where the queen cooked."
Down the hall is Franklin's bedroom, where she spent many nights when she wasn't on the road.
"Because this was so personable in here and this is where she slept, just the bed here, the essence of, I wanted to make sure that it was fit for a queen,” Howell said.
Franklin's bedroom is complete with his and hers closets and an attached master bathroom finished with marble floors and a queen's throne.
"Everything here in the bathroom is original," Howell said. "Of course, this is the tub that the queen bathed in, as well as the shower -- you see the roses that are on the glass here."
The nearly 4,200-square-foot home comes with a sauna, additional living room space in the finished lower level and a full bathroom for almost every bedroom. For Howell, staging the Queen of Soul's home was a huge honor.
"I wanted to make sure that I was doing everything that I thought the queen would like,” he said. “Even after I had finished, Evrod, I went to her portrait and said, ‘I hope you're pleased with what I've done to your home.’"
The asking price is $1.2 million. A lot of credit goes to Steven Bird, of DreamMaker Bath and Kitchen in Livonia, who was hired to remodel the home from the inside out. It took him six months of construction to get the home in tip-top shape.
The home was not Franklin's primary residence, and she hadn't lived there in more than 20 years.