He designed grand estates for "the great and the wealthy of the Detroit area" (such as Ford, Fisher, Bugas, Scherer, Stroh, Knudsen, Pingree and indirectly Taubman, Hermelin, and Caldwell), and "his work appeared in national magazines for decades.

Keyes opened his own office in Detroit in 1921,[2] and his career spanned the roaring twenties, the Great Depression, and into the post war boom mid-century modern period.

[10] Keyes's houses were known for being "built for the ages" (typically of "concrete and steel construction")[11] and devoid of frills or affectation, his "free use of classical forms" done "without trickery or ostentation.

[15] Commenting on the technological and aesthetic trend in modern architecture, Keyes observed: The World today is being made over to fit a new tempo of life, and it is unthinkable that Detroit, leading the country in the advance of industrial design, should be content to live in homes of the past.

[17][18][19][20] The Regency manor house features French (Second Empire) elements such as a copper hipped and mansard roofline and Keyes's signature symmetrical bow-fronted wings and wrought iron balconies.

[20] It sits on a wooded knoll overlooking the country estate's expansive ornamental gardens and orchards and adjacent Eliel Saarinen-designed Cranbrook Kingswood[21] (called by The New York Times "one of the greatest campuses ever created anywhere in the world"[22]).

A list of renowned designers have contributed to Woodland's "pedigreed architecture":[20] Eliel's son Eero Saarinen was at the time renovating his own Victorian house nearby on Vaughan Road and worked informally with Keyes; French designer Andrée Putman—"the doyenne of contemporary French design"[23] who created hotels and homes (though "Putman rarely accept[ed] commissions for private residences except for very close friends, such as Karl Lagerfeld [and the Taubmans]"[23]) in Paris, New York, Brussels, and Monte Carlo (as well as designed the Air France Concorde interior)[19]—designed seven of Woodland's bathrooms[24] and added an enormous spa with antique Italian glass mosaic tiles and a domed ceiling with a "luminous cornice"[17][19] ("Putman's baths are legendary," according to Architectural Digest, what she called "the core of a home"[23]); and William Hodgins,[25] "one of the deans of American interior decoration,"[20] later made additional and notable Regency interior modifications.

Keyes had already been working in Bloomfield Hills (starting in the 1930s—see Welch and Lake Park House below) when Louis Clifford Goad (Executive Vice President of General Motors Company[28]) hired him to design his estate there.

The twelve-room house incorporates Keyes's signature symmetrical bow-fronted wings, clean white brick façade and wrought iron railings, and includes contrasting French shutters and a Palladian, Ionic colonnaded and pedimented front portico with spiral volutes.

"[29] The integrated conservatory overlooks the south sloping grounds, with an unusual oval, stone, and "terraced garden and wooded section which lead to a stream,"[30] a tributary of the River Rouge.

"[33] The gracious and understated mansion is a fraternal twin to Keyes's Goad House, from its clean white brick façade to its front pillars, layout and proportions.

[33] Fisher was a major supporter of Israel (its "most successful fund raiser" and "the single most important lay person in the American Jewish community"[36]) and close Middle East advisor to Republican Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, G.H.W.

The house forms a crescent (typical to the Regency style), with a dramatic open floor plan with walls of glass facing Lake St. Clair.

He built his home on Lee Gate Lane specifically to accommodate his sprawling collection—and he looked hard to find an architect to match the quality of his art.

(Tannahill's gifts, valued at around half-a-billion dollars, "have become among the most recognizable and highly prized paintings" in the museum's world-class collection—all of which he notably restricted from sale and thus protected from creditors.

Mr. Keyes incorporated the latest innovations, such as fiberglass insulation, circuit breakers, double glazed windows, and forced heating and air conditioning.

Woodley Green Lake Shore Dr., Grosse Pointe (1934, 1959) Clients: Emory W. Clark, Benson Ford Style: Regency, Georgian Woodley Green, considered "one of [Keyes's] finest houses,"[2] is another important work in the Regency and Neo-Palladian style, with a stone pediment front portico with Ionic columns, a parapet and copper hipped roof, and a red brick façade with Keyes's expected "delicate iron grillwork railings"[6] and symmetrical bow-fronted flanking wings.

Keyes retained his characteristic clean lines, open floor plan, and dramatic light-filled rooms—provided by the maximized window surface area from the back courtyard.

New ceilings, fireplaces (including a design with elaborate Doric frieze carving in the parlor[59]), windows, air supply equipment, wiring and lighting "presented a number of problems which were successfully solved.

Members included Detroit industrialists such as the families of Henry Ford, William Durant, Walter Briggs, C. Thorne Murphy, Alvan Macauley, David Wallace, Gordon Saunders, and Lang Hubbard.

[31]) McLouth would later again hire Keyes for his summer home and private wilderness club Green Timbers, as well as for the Tyrol Ski Lodge at his Hidden Valley Resort.

Keyes continued his large white brick façade, accented with French shutters, a unique colonnaded copper front portico, and a steep, hipped roof broken up with curved dormers.

In 1935, the Pingrees hired Keyes to design extensive additions to their home (as he had done in 1925 for William Pickett Harris), tripling its original size in order to turn it into a year-round residence.

(Keyes borrows from Robert O. Derrick's 1926 design of nearby Edwin H. Brown House, "striking a note of restrained yet charmingly intimate French Classicism with its Mansard roof.

"[10]) Pingree House is significant in that it marked the beginning of Keyes's more restrained and increasingly French-influenced Regency style, and it was his first use of the mansard roof that would be a prominent feature in what he considered one of his greatest designs—Woodland.

Dwyer/Palms House Lake Shore Rd., Grosse Pointe Farms (1928) Client: Marie Fleitz Dwyer Style: French Normandy Built "in the late 20s, when cost was of little or no consideration,"[11] for Marie Fleitz Dwyer, the widowed daughter of a Michigan lumber baron and grain merchant, the French Normandy style house was the first in the area wired for telephones (and, until recently, there was a circuit panel in the garage through which all the neighborhood phones were wired).

The design included Keyes's first use of a massive wall with slate-roofed pillars surrounding the estate, which matches and is incorporated into the brick façade of the house—an often-repeated motif later in his career.

The rich, tawny color of the Norway pine logs furnishes a substantial and cheerful background for the showy reds and blues of the chairs, rugs, and curtains.

"Designed by Keyes during the height of the roaring twenties, it provided a dramatic setting for large parties the wealthy Charles Dean (its original owner) was famous for hosting.

[10] Ridgeland's Italianate style is Keyes's first significant experiment with Palladianism, synthesized with picturesque aesthetics: low-pitched and hipped tile roofs, stained glass windows, arched doors and ceilings, loggias and balconies with wrought iron railings, a tower, and walls and beams painted with elaborate 14th-century Florentine motifs.