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Midwest Home /  March 2008 /  Light House on the Lake

Light House on the Lake

Charles Stinson creates a living sculpture on Lake Minnetonka

Joanne Siegel stares out the windows of her new home, past crystalline maple tree branches, to three icehouses clustered neatly on a frozen expanse of Lake Minnetonka. “In the summertime, you can see the cruise boats,” she says. Joanne and her husband of 40 years, Al, built the house a year-and-a-half ago on a sliver of land between St. Albans and Excelsior Bays.

The couple originally planned to remodel their 16-year-old home in Minnetonka. They met with Deephaven-based architect Charles Stinson and ticked off their wish list: a fresh, updated look, a totally revamped floor plan, private spaces for art-making and yoga, and stylish landscaping. Finally, Stinson recalls, Al pushed back his chair and said, “You know, what I really want to do is build a house.” The architect had just the place: a heavily wooded, sloped site in Greenwood that he had purchased for himself before deciding to remodel his existing home. “I took them out to see it, and it was pretty much a done deal after that,” Stinson says.

Stinson designed the Siegels’ new home with three words in mind: “urban tree house.” The entire first floor is vaulted a story above ground, high enough to enjoy the breathtaking vistas. The entrance sits midway between the ground and the living area, adding a touch of suspense: Guests must go up a flight of pure-white concrete steps to the front door and the glass-enclosed, beacon-like front atrium, and then up another half-flight to the main level.

“In order to get the views, you have to live up in the air,” Stinson says. “The effect is, there’s this dramatic entrance where you’re pulled toward the house and the light, and you’re going higher and higher up. At night it’s like a lighthouse.”

The home’s exterior is an amalgam of geometric forms; large panes of glass meet black metal window frames. Like a gymnast’s ribbon, a sculptural band of smooth-finished, synthetic stucco winds its way over, under, and around the glass panes—never closing in on itself and never touching the ground.

To break up the horizontal planes of the design, Stinson used a grid of charcoal gray concrete blocks as vertical towers. “Putting this house together was like a Chinese puzzle,” he says. “Nothing could be off by even a hair, or we would’ve had to cut blocks, which nobody wanted to do.” Streeter & Associates, the Wayzata builder who partnered with Stinson on the home, handled the delicate and exacting work.

The interior is equally sculptural. The great room balances shelter, definition, and release, blocking light at some angles, and then letting it move freely at others. To the west, sliding glass doors open onto a massive ipe deck, where Joanne loves to sun worship. On the east wall of the great room, green tips of boxwood peek through two, 24- to 30-foot-high windows. A sectional and chairs, each covered in different shades of gray ultra suede, complement the soaring concrete-block fireplace and bamboo flooring.

“The hope was to create an interior that would honor the architecture and create a very Zen aesthetic,” says Ruth Johnson, interior designer at CRS Interiors. “The bamboo is particularly wonderful because it reflects the light coming in from both directions.”

For the kitchen counters and island, Johnson chose the richly hued “Volga Blue” granite, a material that resembles crushed sapphires when the light hits it just so. The galley kitchen features maple and stainless steel.

A zigzagged, black-stained concrete retaining wall frames the back of the home and allows natural light to flow through the owner’s bathroom. This tranquil space, accented with rich cocoa brown, has a jetted soaking tub, tiled shower, and heated floors. On the main floor, Joanne’s yoga space is a bamboo-floored room with an 8-by-8-foot picture window that looks out on twisted, arching tree branches.

“The idea was to have a space for her to look at nature, where nature would be frozen like an abstract painting,” Stinson says.

Joanne’s other special space is the lower-level art studio where she can close the door and work without fending off their cat, a Pixie-Bob named Ringo, who’s notorious for eating glue and tape. Nearby is an intimate screened porch where Joanne gathers with friends and relatives to play cards.

Al’s private sanctuaries include a cedar sauna and steam shower, a media room with a built-in wet bar, and a raised office area, where he can display his extensive power-lifting trophy collection. The retired stockbroker still works out religiously at age 73.

Just outside the office, a group of pagoda dogwoods surround a regularly visited birdfeeder. The landscape, designed by Coen+Partners of Minneapolis, includes low-voltage lights installed in the property’s many maple trees. The lights shimmer on falling raindrops and snowflakes, creating a aquarium effect from inside the house.

“At first I felt like I was living in my own reality TV show with all this glass,” Joanne says. “But now I feel so enclosed when I’m in other types of houses. I can’t imagine being anywhere else.”

Alyssa Ford is the assistant editor at Midwest Home.

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