325 Summer Street, Buffalo, NY 14222

Over a century ago, one of the country's first breakfast cereal titans built himself a home worthy of the Gilded Age. It's six thousand square feet of brick and walnut and marble, rising up on the corner of Norwood Avenue and Summer Street like a declaration, like a monument built not just for a cereal baron but for the ages. Step through the enormous wood front door and understand immediately that craftsmanship is a word that has been cheapened, degraded, run through the modern mill and spat out as a marketing term. Here it means something. The walnut floors in the living room. The marble in the foyer. The moldings in the dining room, climbing the walls in their plaster splendor. The house has lived many lives in its 124 years — private mansion, music school, speech clinic, private mansion again-cycling through Buffalo's own century of boom and retrenchment and renaissance, never falling backwards and standing exactly where Ellsworth planted it, on this tree-lined street in the...