Home & Design | Defining Character

Building a home that feels old is nothing new for the design team behind this Nantucket-style colonial on Turtle Lake in Shoreview. But the nuance of a look that’s evolved through the years—with era-specific additions and tweaks—is far less common. “When you’re building a new house, you usually make all of the spaces perfectly logical,” interior designer Marita Simmons says. “But this home has some character—and some quirks and imperfections.” 

“Even though everything is very planned out, it feels selected over time and like it came together in a way that is just happenstance.

 —Marita Simmons, interior designer

Those qualities were exactly what the empty-nester owners were after for their home—for it to feel 200 years old but updated over time. The idea takes root in the front garden’s dry-set walls. As landscape designer Scott Ritter notes, “The stone picks up the colors of the siding and shutters and brings them back down into the landscape.” But it deliberately does not match the more rust-colored stone on the home itself. “I think that gives it more of a colonial vibe,” Ritter says. “A lot of times, colonials were sort of handed down from generation to generation. And people of different generations would work on and add to the house.” 

That intentional mismatching applies to the architecture of the home, too, including the front exterior’s lack of perfect symmetry. “The right side of the house off the front entry is different than the left side of the house,” architectural designer Jeff Murphy says. “You see that a lot in some of the quirkier colonials, which we like. It’s more interesting.”

Similarly interesting surprises abound in smaller architectural elements, as well, including a diamond-shingle pattern in the siding above the front entry, a roof structure above the garage doors, and a salvaged cupola originally from a building at Macalester College that was found by the homeowners at Bauer Brothers Salvage. “[The owner] asked us, ‘Do you think the cupola works scale-wise?’” Murphy says. “We checked, and it was perfect.”

“The owners were all about that indoor/outdoor experience—a place where, on nice evenings, they could get outside, cook a meal, and have dinner.”

—T.J. Majdecki, architect

The cupola’s patina was perfect, too. “They loved the fact that we were bringing in something that already had history,” says architect T.J. Majdecki, who partnered with Murphy on the architecture. “That was one of the driving forces for the design—that it felt like it had been sitting on Turtle Lake for decades.”

The idea also extends to the interior. “It feels very established,” Simmons says. But that doesn’t mean grand spaces. “For the homeowners and guests alike, you’re finding these spaces as you walk through the home,” builder Rick Hendel says. “There’s not just one big area and ‘Here’s the home,’ but more of discovering rooms and details as you meander.”

Compartmentalizing rooms with different wall finishes helps achieve that goal. While most rooms’ walls are painted—many in different hues thanks to the wife’s love of color—the living room is paneled in character-grade oak. “We thought, ‘What are we going to do that’s going to make it feel important and that’s going to deviate from these other spaces?’” interior designer Krysta Gibbons says. “Paneling is atypical, especially in new construction. But that warm tone was the right answer from minute one.” 

The white oak floors are just a touch lighter. “We wanted to tell the story that the floors came first, the walls came later,” Gibbons says. “It wouldn’t have all come at once.”

A similar idea takes shape in the scullery, which is saturated in color with Farrow and Ball Hague Blue on the cabinets and Benjamin Moore Gray Pinstripe on the walls. “It feels more ephemeral in nature, like what you’d see in an older home, with two colors that are somewhat monochromatic but not the same,” Gibbons says. “That’s because the entire room wouldn’t have been done at once. Sometimes you’d have an oil paint and sometimes you’d have a milk paint, and the paint colors would vary not only in when they were applied and how they were absorbed but in how they’d change over time.”

Cabinets embody an altogether different quirk in the main bath upstairs. “We wanted the vanities to feel like furniture,” Simmons says. The “flaming” pattern  in the mahogany veneer grain of the pieces is indeed furniture-like, as is the way the two pieces don’t perfectly match. 

The quirk factor of the vanities even went as far as placing the wife’s vanity against a window. “It was something that, when you look at it on paper, you scratch your head and say, ‘Is there a more balanced way we can do this?’” Majdecki says. “But she wanted to be as close to that window as possible. ‘And if that vanity presses right into the window,’ she said, ‘That’s 100 percent fine with me.’”

“Can we perfect things so that they all look the same? Yes. But here, we were revealing the story of how a home would truly evolve over time.”

–Krysta Gibbons, interior designer

Architecture: Jeff Murphy and T.J. Majdecki, Associate AIA, Murphy and Co. Design, 811 Glenwood Ave., Ste. 250, Mpls., 612-470-5511, murphycodesign.com // Interior Design: Marita Simmons and Krysta Gibbons, Kipling House Interiors, 275 Market St., Ste. 513, Mpls., 612-767-0356, kiplinghouse.com // Builder: Rick and Amy Hendel, Hendel Homes, 15250 Wayzata Blvd., Wayzata, 952-404-7204, hendelhomes.com // Landscape Design: Scott Ritter, Topo, 530 N. 3rd St., Ste. 401, Mpls., 612-929-2049, topollc.com