Super 6

June 2006 Special Advertising Section

When you first walk into a room, what is it that strikes you—an elegant chandelier, a rose-flecked granite countertop, or perhaps a welcoming hearth set off by an ornate mantle? Details such as these can add character to a space, but for a truly outstanding room, multiple elements and features must blend seamlessly—and relate to the rooms in the rest of the home. This requires vision, and a good remodeler is able to see the sum of the parts, rather than the parts themselves. We found six area remodelers who mastered that equation in some very different and challenging spaces. We talked to them about their visions, their methods, and the materials that made the rooms come together.

Cooking with a View
Lake Minnetonka, the remodeler, Lake Country Builders of Excelsior, felt the gorgeous views and the kitchen should be the focal points. The client, who enjoys cooking, agreed that the kitchen was most important room in the house, says Erin Rogers, the project captain. So Lake Country Builders moved the kitchen from its previous location in the front of the house to the back. “That allowed us to get more windows and doors on the lakeside view,” she says. Next, the designers brought in custom-built cabinets and a specially designed center island. “The island and the cabinetry detail was something that we just went over the top with,” Rogers says. They chose a mildly-knotted alder for a rustic, Craftsman look, and doubled the amount of cabinet space by adding a built-in bench and display cabinetry in the expanded kitchen space. The six-foot-square center island features a raised, rounded eating bar mounted on its corner, and it incorporates a vegetable sink without sacrificing its plentiful workspace. Though the room works well on its own, Rogers and her team wanted to relate the kitchen to the rest of the renovations—especially a porch that had been added facing the lake at a slight angle from the house’s orientation. They echoed the porch’s angle in the kitchen’s coffered ceiling, in the placement of the center island, and even in the just-off-kilter floor tiles. “The angle really brings your attention to the view of the lake,” says Rogers. “It’s parallel with the lakeshore.”

A Downstairs Pub
In the renovation of the lower-level of a Plymouth home, the remodeler installed angled beams in the coffered ceiling to give the previously staid space more dimension. “We were limited in the space—it was just a rectangle,” says Melanie Trachsel, a designer with Streeter & Associates of Deephaven, who redesigned the room with an Irish pub theme. “To create a more interesting space, we had to visually stimulate the whole design.” Diagonal lines and tin inlays are interspersed between the rich wood beams in the coffered ceiling, and birch woodwork is rusticated and distressed for a worn-in feel. A stained-concrete floor balances out the warmth of the wood, and grout lines in the floor line up with the beams overhead to mirror the angle element. To soften the geometric angles and lines, Trachsel included some curved details: a wrought-iron railing leading upstairs, doorways topped with arches, a fireplace screen with a wrought-iron scroll, and the bar, which bows out in the middle. Paralleling the bar is a wood soffit on the ceiling. “The curved bar is the most exciting feature,” she says. “It all works well together.” Additional touches include a distressed copper sink and light fixtures with copper accents. Trachsel chose pewter for cabinetry and door hardware to mix up the metals and tie into the tin ceiling. Distressed metallic tiles in the back wall suggest a mirror, and light fixtures set in the brick wall give the area its antique, pub-like feel—one that is decidedly different from the rest of the house. “It’s very sophisticated,” says Trachsel. “The downstairs looks like it could be 100 years old.”

Family Retreat
For older homes, the challenge for remodelers is to incorporate modern conveniences in a way that doesn’t conflict with old design styles. Such was the case for Gary Aulik of St. Louis Park–based Aulik & Associates, when a client requested a renovation of their Tudor-style home overlooking Lake of the Isles. “Many of the spaces in the home—the living area, entryway, den—are very formal environments,” he says. “The family wanted to introduce an area where they could be together in a much more casual environment.” The most likely candidate for remodeling was a long room above the detached garage that the previous owner had used as a home theater. It was accessible from the house via a causeway over the porte-cochère (an enclosed entrance), but Aulik and the chief architect of project, Wayne Capra, suggested creating a mudroom in the garage that led up into the new family area. They absorbed one of the garage’s far stalls and used a stamped and stained concrete product for the mudroom floor. Each of the four family members has one custom-built cubby for their coats, hats, boots, and other gear; the drawers and shelves can be adjusted in height as the kids grow.

A stairwell leads up into a study area for the kids, with the balance of the space over the garage filled with a family/entertainment room, bar, game room and reading area, and a home theater. Despite the lighter feel to the space, and its separate location, Aulik and Capra wanted it to relate to the rest of the home. They chose similar dark and medium tones of wood, but used vertical-grain fir, as opposed to walnut. Not only was fir commonly used in the spare rooms or servants’ quarters of old mansions, fir handles wear-and-tear better. “It’s a softer wood, so when it takes a nick or ding, it tends to add to its character, instead of detracting from its formality,” says Aulik. It can also be relatively evenly stained, antiqued, and glazed to mimic an older, original look—as was the case here.

A hand-wrought plaster finish invoked an aged feeling as well, and timber beams were added to the ceiling of one section of the space to bring a rustic, attic-like character. Some elements, such as the honed granite bar top and hand-hammered copper sink, hint at an aged look, while others actually are vintage: Aulik sourced antique light fixtures, an antique fir fireplace mantle, and, for cabinetry, pitted iron hinges, handles, and knobs that are pockmarked with hints of rust.

Bathroom Trio
When Holly Bayer Seel, of Minnetonka-based interior design company hauthaus, inc., was asked to redesign two bathrooms and create a design for a third in a century-old Minneapolis home, the main challenge was how to tie the three rooms together. To make sure her designs were practical as well as aesthetic, Seel asked Tim Purcell of Purcell, Inc.  in White Bear Lake to facilitate the project. “The connecting piece for all three bathrooms was to do something somewhat historic but also luxurious,” says Seel. “We chose historic-looking but very fine fixtures [Perrin & Rowe] for each bathroom.” They also used imperial white marble in the different spaces for the tile, tub deck, and a cabinet top to tie all three bathrooms together. But each space also had its own distinctive character. For instance, the sink room featured an apothecary cabinet Seel designed for the client’s makeup and accessories, and the second floor bathroom included a restored medicine cabinet and bead board, a Victorian-era wood wall treatment. The third floor bathroom, which was created during the renovations, sported a period-looking shower fixture with hot and cold levers and piping on the outside. Purcell also tackled the technically difficult task of undermounting the tub so that it sits below the marble tub deck. He added a wall-mounted towel warmer and a glass-block window in the tub room, and fitted a dark twelve-panelled walnut door with mirrors in the new bathroom for a useful, yet brightening, feature. Purcell also reconstructed the medicine cabinet that originally came with the house, and built the custom-designed cherry cabinetry and apothecary cabinet—one of his favorite defining elements. “The apothecary cabinet has a marble top, polished chrome bars that go to the wall for towel bars, and tiny little drawers that dovetail,” he says. “The room is very tiny, and the cabinetry just makes the room.”

Poolside Tropics
When K. C. Chermak of Pillar Homes in Plymouth was remodeling his own basement to complement a family-friendly outdoor pool area, he took the plunge with a Bahamas theme. “The pool changed the dynamics of how we wanted to use the lower level,” he says. “When we remodeled, we changed it into a poolside cabana and extended the use of the space.” The basement is awash in bright, tropical colors and contemporary details. Chermak was careful to ensure the designs remained bright yet soothing, with a spa-like, aquatic feel. He succeeded by staying away from teals and corals, instead opting for aqua blue, green, and muted mango. Wood elements, such as the maple cabinets around the wet bar, were double-painted in blue and green, then distressed to look as though they’d weathered several equatorial storms. The bathroom—relocated to an area that’s more accessible to the pool—also features distressed cabinetry in white, as well as distressed beadboard and bamboo flooring and benches. After passing from the pool through a workout area, family members enter a changing area that includes a vanity surrounded by one-inch tiles made of a metallic-looking Italian glass. Three pendant lights drop from the ceiling, shielded with opalescent glass.

Another door leads into the family entertaining area, where a custom-built wet bar is tucked under the stairwell. Chermak used bamboo flooring as the bar’s countertop, which arcs out in a long curve, and chose stools made with bamboo designs. In the home theater space, decorated with overstuffed chairs, a fireplace is set with seashells placed in sandy-looking grout. Despite all the fun features, Chermak is especially pleased with a band of rope lighting hidden in a cove encircling the entire room. “It’s my favorite part of the whole basement,” he says. “It set such an atmosphere with the lighting.”

A Sun-Filled Kitchen
Lightening a space can be accomplished in multiple ways—through special lighting, brighter colors, adding windows, or even knocking down a few walls. A recent kitchen remodel in a Deephaven home attained better illumination through all of these methods, as well as by adding an eight-by-twenty-five-foot addition on back of the home.

The house, which was built in 1978, previously sported eight-foot ceilings that felt lower because of the space’s dark woodwork. JoLynn Johnson, owner and president of Crystal Kitchen Center, focused on lightening everything up by taking out two supporting walls and combining the kitchen, dining room, and family room into one greatroom to fill the new addition. “We had to deal with a support post that came smack through the middle of the island,” says Johnson, describing the twenty-foot center island, which tapered at one end. She disguised it with cabinet material, and added ceiling beams to further camouflage the structural necessity. The ceiling beams not only added a nice touch to the kitchen, but continued through the entire greatroom to bring it all together.

Cabinetry contributes to the lightening effect as well, with alder wood used in the island and off-white paint with brown highlights coating the remaining cupboards and drawers. A massive hood spreads five feet across the top of the stove, and a nine-foot-long window arches above the sink to bring in natural light. The unusual shapes to each feature, as well as the island, helped break up the length of the room. For a little extra light, Johnson put a small eyebrow window into the ceiling between the beams. “It’s a little Cape Coddish–looking from the exterior,” she says. “This one will always stand out in my mind because it was such a fun project to work on. I got such a sense of accomplishment from it, and the homeowners love it.”