St. Paul Residence

When Susan Engeleiter and her husband purchased a historic Crocus Hill neighborhood Tudor, they opted for a complete remodel. Engeleiter is president of Plymouth-based Data Recognition Corp. and her children attend schools in the Twin Cities. So the home serves as a satellite residence for this busy family of five that also maintain their primary residence in Sommerset.

The beauty of this project is that if you didn’t know work had been recently completed, you would assume it was all original construction. “I hate fake old,” says the project’s lead designer, David Heide, “or something trying to be what it’s not.” His team took the “respect the past and anticipate the future” approach for a flawless end result.

Heide says he let the house speak to him, including the foyer, which had an unfinished quality about it. An exposed radiator along a wall created unusable space until a custom banquette was created that’s more architecture than furniture. A new front door with art glass designed by Michael Crull introduced a design detail carried throughout the new windows in the dining room and sunroom. Heide also sourced all of the vintage lighting for the home, including a lovely Art Nouveau sconce in the foyer that he found while antiquing. The piece is so appropriate for the house that he had eight additional lights cast from the original.

The dining room also boasts perfectly executed changes that seemed meant to be. Heide refers to this as “putting things back.” The original dining room window was much larger and offered only a view of the garage. Since the art glass window is opaque, it obscures the bad view. Flanking the window are two of the reproduction sconces introduced in the foyer. Though an arched soffet was in place, the space lacked a grand buffet. The new built-in adds architecture to the room and introduces more glass and a mirror to the space.

Like many homes of this era, a large screened porch was located adjacent to the living and dining rooms, accessible via French doors. The space was converted to a usable year-round sunroom—one of the family’s favorite rooms. Here the art glass really shines within transom windows on three sides.

The entire project, which included five bathrooms, a master suite, and the kitchen, took more than one year to complete. Heide sees it as a chance to affect the property and be a part of history. “A vocabulary of those who preceded me—a collective ownership,” he says.