921 E. Huron St.

Twenty-two years ago, Bob Materka stood on the balcony of the three-story bed and breakfast he and his wife, Pat, had recently bought, facing the lawn by the Rackham Building. It was Christmastime, and he found his yard lacking. “Gee whiz,” he thought, “we should decorate this in some way.”

By the next December, he’d made good on that promise. It started with a few yuletide-themed blowups—a purple-hatted polar bear, a snowman, a pair of penguins with mistletoe on their hats, a giant candy cane—on the deck. Year after year, the collection grew. And now, as anyone who passes 921 E. Huron St. in autumn knows, the Materkas cram some forty blowups onto seemingly every inch of the deck and yard in an eye-popping riot of multi-holiday cheer.

“When the frost hits, the blocks come out of the basement,” says Bob, eighty-one, a retired software developer. “I used to set them all up myself. Then I got knee problems and I couldn’t do it anymore, so I borrowed a few of Pat’s people working up in the B&B. Now, in the last couple years, our handyman Bill does it.”

Even without the blowup display—which shrinks after Christmas but, thanks to air-filled palm trees, rarely entirely disappears—the house would still be notable for its unusual provenance. It was built in the early 1960s by Fred Ulrich Jr. as a family home and, surprisingly, as a fallback in case his retail and real-estate empire somehow collapsed. That’s why, Pat Materka explains, he included three rental apartment units.

Ulrich’s house replaced a teardown he bought in 1962 from dry cleaner and one-time state representative Walter Tubbs. He hired rising modernist architect David W. Osler, whose other local designs include the striking Oslund condos on Glazier Way.

Ulrich’s namesake bookstore was so successful that he kept expanding into neighboring buildings on South U—Ann Arbor Street Art Fair cofounder Bruce Henry, whose store Artisans was across the street, called him “the landlord of us all.” But “because Fred had grown up during the Depression, according to his grown daughter who we met, he decided to hedge his bets by creating this one big apartment for himself and his wife and then three little two-room apartments that he attached to it and rented to his employees and friends,” Pat says.

Ulrich’s daughter, Sandra Ulrich Odell, died in July at eighty-eight in Naples, Florida. Already an adult when her parents built the house, she spent most of her adult life in Connecticut and Florida, with her final public appearance in these parts coming in 2017 when the city placed a historical marker at South University and East University on the plaza outside the spot where her father’s iconic bookstore had stood (a small part of its space is now M-36 Coffee). Her remains did return to be buried at St. Thomas Catholic Cemetery beside her parents and brother.

By the time the Materkas entered the picture, most of Ulrich’s unit had already been converted to a three-room bed and breakfast. They bought it in 2003 after raising their two children in an 1842 farmhouse at the corner of Miller Ave. and Newport.

Pat and Bob moved into the third-floor loft, converted the three two-room apartments into six more rooms, and renamed the business the Ann Arbor Bed & Breakfast. Pat, eighty, never made a big deal out of the breakfast part, just a buffet of yogurt, fresh fruit, cereal, breads, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and made-to-order eggs on request. There’s no reason to do more, she says. “There are forty-five restaurants within a ten-minute walk.

“On any given morning, we have mathematicians who are visiting the university or parents and students coming to see the campus, and two-thirds of them will happily come to breakfast—the other people sleep in,” says Pat, a former Ann Arbor News reporter and U-M News Service writer.

She says the clientele is typically “pretty laid-back, very outgoing,” but they’ve hosted some boldfaced names, including Michigan football great Desmond Howard, alum and TV star Lucy Liu, and 1960s radical Bill Ayers. “We had all the children of the Weather Underground once because one of the children was marrying a local girl,” Pat says. “They booked the whole place.”

Pat, a part-time antiques dealer who buys and sells vintage toys on Etsy, filled the rooms with baubles, knickknacks, and funky or storied furnishings. One room, for instance, contains a 1920s-era oak rolltop desk that Pat says was the “first or second antique I ever got, from an old sewing machine repair shop in Ypsilanti, when we were newly married.”

A framed image of four people out-side a red home flanked by apple trees and surrounded by flowers catchesher attention.

“I needlepointed this probably about fifty years ago,”  she says. “That would have been me, my husband, our two children, our original farmhouse, and all of those things around it.” She started it then set it aside unfinished; her daughter Shannon found and finished it years later.

When the Materkas moved in, Pat says, the walls of the upper two levels were “kind of an industrial white.” Their son, Marc, who died at age thirty-eight in 2011 in a drowning incident on a family trip to Disney World, “brought lots of color in. He was a painter/remodeler.”

The Ulrichs’ fingerprints abound, too. Pat points out the kitchen island with a cooktop, which she figures was rare in 1962.

Fred and his wife, Helen, had the largest bedroom, but later it became Helen’s room alone. “This was a big room for this big, important man, but we learned that from his grown daughter that Fred snored and his wife decided when they were in their older years that she wanted her own bedroom, and so this became her bedroom,” she chuckles.

Even for a happy innkeeper like Pat, the workload drove her to ask the city in 2015 to allow them to sell off units as condominiums. They were expecting to meet resistance, she says, but found city leaders happy to have more housing downtown. Borrowing from the landmark across the street, they named that part of their business the Rackham Garden Condominiums.

The first three units sold in 2019 and 2020. “Parents bought them because they wanted safe places for students to live,” Pat recalls. The fourth sold early this year to the family of a woman starting med school.

“The motivation [for the sales] was creating less work—and raising money because by this point, most of our money is in this building,” Pat says.

The condos are each roughly 600 square feet with two bathrooms and a kitchenette. That leaves the Ann Arbor Bed & Breakfast with four guest rooms, and occasionally more when condo owners allow their space to be used in exchange for a share of the revenue.

“I loved running this as a nine-room bed and breakfast for fifteen years, but as I got older, I just found that I still wanted to run a B&B but something smaller with fewer staff and fewer guests, even though I loved having lots of guests,” Pat says.

Last month, Shannon Materka moved back to her hometown to take over the business. Pat and Bob, who lived in the third-floor loft for years, recently moved to a ground-floor apartment when Bob’s legs started failing him. “We love to live downtown, and downtown is even more expensive, and here we have this place, so why not just make this transition now?” Pat says.

Shannon and husband Kevin, who for at least the next year will remain in Belchertown, MA, at his job, told her parents about seven years ago that they wanted to take over. “She began saying things I hadn’t heard before like, ‘It’s always been my dream to run a bed and breakfast,’” Pat says. “Okay, well then. People tend to romanticize it. You will be hard-pressed to find very many people who have done it for nineteen or twenty years.”

“Running a bed and breakfast is so very different from any other career that I’ve ever had,” says Shannon, a 1987 Pioneer High alum. “I’ve worked in cubicles, I’ve worked in tourism, and I’ve worked at schools, and now I have control of this new thing that is both exciting and intimidating.

“I feel really encouraged by the number of people who come back year after year. The kinds of people who seek out a bed and breakfast are just such friendly, relaxed, nice people who want to get to know you, who want to get to know the town. So there’s very little downside from what I can see.”

She’s already made a few changes, replacing the kitchen appliances and shelving. “It’s been enlightening because I’ve found all the different kinds of baking dishes and like seven vegetable peelers,” she says. Unlike her mother, Shannon says she plans to “get more inventive” with the breakfast, offering at least one specialty dish each day.

One thing she won’t change anytime soon, much as she admits she’d like to—the blowup collection.

“It’s not my design style,” she says. “However, I know that the city of Ann Arbor loves it and people identify this building with the inflatables. People stop in front and take photos all the time and you can see it spreads joy. Therefore, the inflatables shall continue.”