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SALT LAKE CITY — Most prospective homeowners decide to buy a house because they want to live in it. Merv Brown went shopping for a house of his own because he wanted to play in it.
It was a pipe dream that began years ago in church, a place where Brown fell in love with the music of the pipe organ.
“I guess I was 9 years old and I watched the organist and I pretended I was playing the organ when I was sitting in the pew,” Brown said. “They were using their feet, so I pretended like I was using my feet.”
He took organ lessons and when he was a teenager began building a pipe organ in his parent’s garage. In high school he worked for an organ maker and the man paid him in parts.
Brown says he burned the roof off the garage when an oil heater he used to keep the space warm ignited the building. He says he told firefighters not to use water to douse the flames.
“I didn’t want to wreck the organ,” he said.
Eventually, though, his pipe organ needed a home of its own, and so he bought it a house.
“I had the organ. I needed a home for it. It was more important than for me,” he said.
He installed the console and the bass pipes in a living room and the rest of the pipes, of which there are 16 hundred, in the dining room. There are pipes that emulate trumpets, oboes, flutes, strings — all the instruments of the orchestra.
“It’s like making your own Stradivarius,” he said. “That’s why I don’t have drapes up and I don’t have much carpet: I want the sound to ring a little bit.”
His wife, Karen, who married her husband and moved into the house after the organ, says she doesn’t mind sharing her home with the massive instrument.
“There’s been too much good in it to ever wish that I didn’t have it,” she said. “He’s just an all-around good person and he’s made us a wonderful home.”
A home for all three of them: Karen, Merv and the pipe organ.
