Ian and Lisa Grant | East Isles, Minneapolis

For a look that is collected but also well-edited, Grant sug- gests reducing a room to a few great pieces and meaningful accents.

A lot has changed since Ian Grant, fresh out of college in 1992, started renting this East Isles duplex. He met his wife, Lisa, and they bought, gutted, and moved into the home in 1995; he opened his retail store, Bjorling & Grant, in 1999; and he became a father when his son, Alex, was born last year. As his life has evolved, so has his home. What started out as a bachelor hangout is now a quaint family home that celebrates Ian and Lisa’s rich cultural heritage and love for foreign art and artifacts. The couple has managed to achieve an interior that has a wonderful collected yet curated look. “The challenge,” Ian says, “is to have a few pieces that can hold a room. The collected look often looks careless or jammed up, especially in smaller spaces in old houses like ours. When you fill a tiny room with a lot of stuff, the result is more akin to a knickknack shop, not a livable space.” In addition to furnishings and art, the couple also made the space more livable by opening up all of the small rooms.

For Love
Grant is quick to credit the success of his store to his wife, Lisa, who is the director of clinical research for CVRx, a medical device company that is developing the first implantable device to treat high blood pressure. “It is a completely unfair arrangement, and I wouldn’t be doing what I love if it wasn’t for Lisa,” says Grant.

Small-Space Living
After they bought the house, Grant gutted the third floor, cutting down walls, tearing up carpeting, restoring the original wood floors, and putting in three skylights, creating a space where energy, light, and people flow freely. Last year, when Alex was born, Grant put up a new wall and created a baby’s room.

History Lesson
Part of Ian Grant’s impetus for importing comes from his parents. “My father is from Scotland, my mother from Ireland, but they both moved here and worked in higher education,” he says.

The third-floor living area is a study in global design—a modern wood-and-leather Eames chair merges with a lamp made from a Danish wallpaper roller, a woven Indian rug, and a joker vine statue from central Thailand.

The nature of their jobs allowed us to do a lot of traveling when I was younger.” Like his store, his home is a blend of relics of the past and imports and new furnishings with a modern twist.

From Shop to Home

While many of the items in the couple’s home are from Grant’s store, most of the pieces have been collected over the past twelve years. “The rugs are a relic of the days when I was a rug merchant, the art has been brought in piece by piece, and many pieces of furniture and accents were collected from my buying trips,” says Grant. “I picked them up knowing that they’d be pieces we’d keep.”