A Sneak Preview

After nearly ninety years, the home known among neighbors as the “house with the mushroom roof” is getting an overhaul. Located on the shores of Lake Minnetonka between Wayzata Bay and Gray’s Bay, this historic home has long been a well-loved feature of the lake community. An easy choice for the 2006 ASID Showcase Home, the Tudor Revival house sits on more than two acres of lakeshore property with views of the sunrise on Gray’s Bay and the sunset on Wayzata Bay. It has a roof that looks like it’s been plucked from the Cotswold hills in England and a charm that has remained solidly intact since it was first built in the early 1900s. What it did need, though, was some updating, and over the past six months the Showcase Home team has been working to renovate the home—and its charming carriage house—without sacrificing the property’s architectural and cultural integrity.

According to Historical and Architectural Resources of Wayzata, Minnesota, the house was built by Dwight F. Brooks as a summer home in the early 1900s. The Brooks family, who owned the Brooks-Scanlon Lumber Company, lived for most of the year in a house on Park Avenue in Minneapolis. Their property on Lake Minnetonka once included not only the main house and the carriage house, but also the rest of the point before Gray’s Bay bridge was built, including a boathouse and a guesthouse that is now located across Bushaway Road. “There are so many people who will tell me about how when they were children, they would play in the Brooks home and the butlers would bring them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on trays,” says Susan Stielow, the home’s current owner.

Cotswold Charm
The home’s soft, organic architecture is certainly unique. The roof is a faux-thatched style, with cedar shakes that flow like waves over the home’s two-and-a-half stories. The front wing has a clipped gable roof that hangs over the colonnaded front entry, and the ivy-covered stucco walls feature decorative half-timbering and long narrow windows. Inside a massive front door, a grand staircase leads up to a classic library and the rest of the second floor, including the master suite, a guest suite, a sitting room, and three additional bedrooms. On the main floor, a large light-filled living room and sunroom feature warm red terracotta floors and the original double-glazed windows that look out over Wayzata Bay. Across the house, another window-lined room serves as a family room off the kitchen and leads to a sprawling lakeside patio. In the attic, where the Brooks family hung a swing for their kids and made a “haunted house” for them to play in, the Stielows also made a play area. They installed beadboard paneling that runs up to the steep, vaulted ceiling, giving it the feel of a cabin or the captain’s suite of a classic ship.

The home has changed hands only once in its history, when John Stielow bought it in 1973 as a bachelor. “I looked at the house, walked around it, looked in the windows, and that was it. I decided right then that I would buy it,” he says. Stielow had previously bought the “Pink Palace” on Lake Minnetonka as a real estate investment, but he knew he wanted to live in the house on Bushaway Road—all 12,000 square feet of it. Stielow did make several updates to the home, including the addition of the family room off the kitchen, but there were still some structural issues the ASID designers and general contractor discovered during the demolition and discovery process.

“When you’re working in an older home, you often have no floor plans, so many of our design plans were redrawn because of what we found during discovery,” says Suzanne Goodwin of Suzanne Goodwin & Associates, the chairperson of the Showcase Home steering committee and one of the designers who worked on the lakeside cottage (formerly the carriage house). “Each design team has gone back and redrawn our designs extensively.” For instance, they discovered that in what is known as the “black and white” bathroom upstairs, the original builders had poured concrete around the tub to keep it in place, but they hadn’t reinforced the floor to handle the weight of the concrete and the cast iron tub. “It didn’t have any support underneath, so it could have at any moment fallen through to the kitchen,” Goodwin says. The master suite had ceiling joists running in opposite directions; the kitchen and family room had three different floor heights; and some of the upstairs walls had two-inch thick plaster, about twice the norm, says John Morris of Stephenson Construction, the project manager.

Seamless Renewal
After fixing the home’s age-related quirks, the designers and contractors set about revamping much of its interior. Structurally, the areas with the biggest changes are the owners’ suite, the guest suite, the kitchen and family room, and the cottage. The owners’ suite had two separate bathrooms that divided the space and gave it a cramped feel. Now, a new bathroom and walk-in closet is at the back of the suite, and the bedroom features a more open layout and sitting area that faces the lake. “Now all of a sudden when you walk in there, it seems like you have a very large bedroom,” Morris says. The guest suite also features a sitting room that looks out over the lake, and a larger bathroom with in-floor heat.

In the kitchen, two skylights were relocated and a beautiful brick wall and arch were built to house a new stove and range and to match a column of Old Chicago brick chimney that was uncovered during the demolition process. The kitchen will feature a new island and cabinets with custom enameled woodwork  will be given a “distressed” look to match the English Cotswolds feel of the rest of the home. Finally, the lakeside cottage was completely gutted and is now a smaller, more informal version of the main house, featuring a charming living room with a fireplace, a kitchen and eating area, one bedroom, a bathroom, and a small basement area.

The color scheme throughout the home was chosen to meld seamlessly with the original architecture as well  as meet the desires of the homeowners. A warm red was chosen with the living room and sunroom floor tiles in mind, a gold matches the Old Chicago brick and will lighten up the many antique furnishings, and a blue-green will add an element of crispness to the guest cottage. All of the wood trim in the main house is being painted in Benjamin Moore linen white, and the textures and patterns aim to reflect the home’s English cottage heritage, with clean, simple lines. The home still reflects the sensibility of Susan Stielow, who remained involved with the process and set two ground rules: that the designers respect the character of the house and that there be no murals. “She’s been the driving force behind what was going to be in and wasn’t,” Goodwin says.

While this process is exciting for the Stielows, it’s also bittersweet. The family spends summers and holidays in Wayzata, but they live in Florida most of the year, and have grudgingly decided to sell the home in spite of their strong emotional attachment. Susan Stielow says making it a Showcase Home will ensure it’s updated for future families and looking its absolute best. Their participation has also helped alleviate one of her nagging concerns: that someone would buy the property for the land and tear down the beautiful home. “I do believe it’s a landmark home,” she says, “and I thought if it got this kind of attention, no one would dare tear it down.”