our work
We consider ourselves progressive people. We search for light and air, soothing comfort and tactile surfaces, beauty and simplicity, tangible relationships between inside and outside space, honest expression of materials and delight in details, and human scale spaces. Mostly, we search in our built work, for strong relationships between these components of good design
Clearwater
Embrace Clear Water Retreat, a thoughtfully designed creation that unites a remote lakeshore setting with modern comfort and craftsmanship, offering a truly immersive and rejuvenating living experience in nature.
Riverfront Jazz
A metaphor, like a vessel under full sail, it virtually rolls across the site. Materials are assembled like the riffs and attitude of modern jazz composition. The “reverse-truss”, with its boat hull skeleton, is a re-purposed fir structure. The thirsty vessel of the master bedroom wing and the butterfly roof of the screen room, explore the range of water‘s poetic qualities. This is a geothermal project.
Amity
Woven into the woods on a restrictive site, this small three-bedroom home integrates itself into a hillside above a creek and floodplain.
Beach Sanctuary
An interiors project, this work references the surrounding beaches and cliffs on Lake Superior, as a starting point for texture, color, pattern, and finish. Materially discerning, this a modern project of utmost craft and attention to detail.
SpokenGear
Take one carefully stewarded cedar forest along a north shore bike trail, add in a coffee bar and café, a bike shop complete with snowshoe and bike rentals and repair, and a custom bike bag manufacturer and you have a most unique experience in the woods.
De Partie
Once a functional household kitchen in 1907, restructured space and summoned daylight bring subtle color, invitation, and joy to the “heart of the home” in this century.
Hawk and Songbird
Forms and orientation designed, with great intention, for daylight, and with indistinct lines between inside and outside, this dual courtyard project perches over an extensive watershed basin to the north and beautiful gardens by the Owner to the south, as a necklace of interior spaces communicate an intimate relationship between building and site.
Island Restyle
On Madeline Island, this is a collection of modern, cottage spaces combining new construction, remodeling, and rehabilitation that transformed an originally encased cabin into a family retreat and studio.
Reframing Modern
An outdated floor plan was unfolded to create a living space perfect for entertaining, yet intimate enough for two. Supporting spaces are framed for a variety of activities. Quality materials, introduced in a nontraditional manner, create an unexpected rambler experience.
Saturated Cabin
Originally a windowless brown box, this project was conceived of as a joyful, acrobatic play of color and structure, transparent to a Lake Superior cliff beyond… A perfect representation of its delightful Owners
Suburban Modern
A unique structure of fully concealed steel and laminated beams, the roof and aspen ceiling float mysteriously above the interior walls. A truly modern suburban home, with references to Do-Wop form and color, its open plan undulates freely. This is as finely crafted a project as it gets and was awarded a Minnesota AIA Honor Award.
The Family Forest
Linked by a simple transparent walkway, two parallel structures visually and physically engage the site and the pool wherever possible. Sleeping spaces, on both ends of the building, are lofty tree houses, where the rooms themselves act as canopies over the beds. Living spaces are light-filled and layered.
The Forest Within
Sheltering below a thick timber gable and reflecting a white pine shoreline, this small family camp, sits serenely on the forest floor. Derived from historic northern farmstead form, the project is a simple and quiet tenant in the woods, where it seems to have always lived.
The Grove
A 1969 vintage all-embracing “update project”, the building opens up to more daylight, softer built form, and fewer divisions of interior spaces. The social front porch returns as a hand-laid stone patio and a grove of apple trees.
The Palisades
Located over an ice cave in the Palisades on the North Shore of Lake Superior, the lovingly conceived project is an extensive remodeling that involved the careful demolition, recycling, and donation of an astounding 70% of the original home materials. Two studios, four bedrooms, one tower, and a spa sit atop a 50’ high cliff and 2000 feet of shoreline. This is a modern and extreme transformation with craft, daylighting, transparency, warm regional materials, and dramatic views packaged in a shell of recycled redwood wine cask and clothed in Zen emotion.
The Highlands
Placed just below a hilltop overlooking the Apostle Islands, this little collection of agrarian building forms perfectly sized for 2 people, very efficiently provides comfortable sleeping for up to 8-10 people, if needed, in a small footprint and a beautiful, tactile interior.
The Lodge
A family lodge on a northern Minnesota lake combines timber frame, post and beam, and conventional framing for permanence, material honesty, structural richness, and remarkable craft. It comfortably accommodates 5 families in separate suites and many grandchildren in a long “train car” bridge, fit with rows of individual, private bunks.
The Penthouse
A penthouse overlooking Lake Superior with crisp lines and high contrast, balanced with simple and spare casework, cabinetry, and minimal materials.
The Shorestead
A Japanese-inspired Finnish Farmstead on Lake Superior creates 3 courtyards between simple all-heart redwood structures connected by copper barrel vaults. The whole project is a collection of structures that include a rehabilitated fish house- now a writing shelter, a recuperated cabin- now a guest quarters, a “resting” bridge, and a network of stone pathways, all accessible.
Hidden Gem
Reserved attitude to the road, this projects saves its embrace for the lakeshore and sunrises. Small. Crafted. Surprising.
Woodland Retreat
Spanning a col between 2 hills, the design plays with the whole site as it flows in and around the building. Each space relates to its position on the site in a unique and specific way, from a transparent bridge of living spaces fully within the trees and above the landscape to sleeping spaces and screen rooms brought quietly down to earth, to a tower for a growing boy.
The Crossing
Surrounded by wetlands allowed to flow below, with one leg each in upland soils, this narrow project starts at grade and slowly rises to the treetops of Lake Superior’s south shore.
Midwest Hamptons
Built in 1907 and disrespected in the ’50s, a stately home gets a refreshing new attitude and casual confidence.
St. Louis Maison
Step into St. Louis Maison, a masterpiece that elegantly marries French farmhouse inspiration with simple Shaker structures, atop the challenges of a steep river peninsula, creating a visually captivating and harmonious living experience.
Water and Stone
Two bathrooms- one about transparency and movement and the other, solid and serene.
