Elysian Fields: A Modern Tudor on a Restored Minnesota Prairie

The house doesn't announce itself from the road. Approaching along the winding path that weaves through the rolling terrain of this design-driven community, a low hill stands between the street and the front door, which to Eric Johnson of the St Louis Park, Minn.-based Christopher Strom Architects, was an opportunity.

Come around it, he says, and the house unfolds in front of you: a white stucco and cedar-shingled modern Tudor with copper gutters catching light and a teal front door. Johnson calls it a point of discovery. In this Stillwater, Minn. community, known as White Oaks Savanna, where the landscape and the design vision shape the interplay of homes and the terrain, withholding the view for a time makes perfect sense.

Guests arrive at a front door that is eight feet wide; an adjacent fixed panel makes the entry read twice as large. Step inside, and you'll find it's been painted the same teal as the dining room, with sightlines through a wall of windows that open onto the prairie beyond. The garage stays out of that arrival moment entirely, Johnson says, tucked away to keep the guest approach clear, and special.

Two Visions, Shared Desires

The clients—a couple relocating from a Saint Paul loft—came to White Oaks Savanna through the development itself, connecting with co-developer Bob Appert, also co-founder of Redstone Builders in Eagen, Minn., before they had an architect or an interior designer.

Appert connected them with Christopher Strom Architects and Minneapolis-based Martha O'Hara Interiors, and they selected Redstone as the builder. But it quickly became clear the couple had divergent ideas about what their dream home should look like.

"The husband really liked modern, and the wife liked traditional, but they had overlapping reasons why they liked those [styles] and the emotions they evoked," says Johnson. "So the compromise was to start with a floor plan both could agree on, and then work toward the aesthetics."

The couple both had Caribbean roots and had spent years in a loft with no room for the extended family visits they'd been missing. They wanted a home that could host relatives for weeks at a time. "You want separation so family has some privacy and space," Johnson says, "but then you come together in the middle and socialize."

That became the organizing principle: a generous shared great room, along with kitchen and dining, flanked by owner and guest suites on opposite ends of the plan.

Once that was established, the question of style became more manageable.

"When it comes to 'modern vs. traditional,' you can’t solve that right away," says Johnson. "So once that [floor] plan started coming together, they started to realize, you can have these more open modern spaces inside a traditional exterior." 

Exterior Jewelry, Texture and Warmth

The exterior cladding became what Johnson describes as the jewelry of the house. Stucco provides a smooth, neutral backdrop for a selection of richer materials: natural stone at the base, cedar shingles, and copper details and gutters that add texture and warmth. A catslide roofline sweeps dramatically on the west elevation (a nod to traditional Tudors), while a flat roof section hidden behind the main roof holds the solar array the clients wanted, without disrupting the design. 

The cedar starts out golden and will mellow toward silver over time, while the copper starts bright and will eventually turn green. Johnson sees that ongoing change as key to the design, a house that changes alongside its landscape. 

The copper gutters were a line item that survived, while other materials were swapped out in the interest of budget. The wood ceiling detailing in the great hall, for instance, was originally specified as vertical grain cedar (beautiful, but expensive). Builder Bob Appert brought the team an alternative. "I had a sample made up of vertical grain cedar and vertical grain Douglas fir and set it out for the group to consider," he says. "Nobody could tell the difference, and the Doug fir came in at half the cost." 

North Glass, Cold Glass

Siting the house on the five-acre lot presented its own demands. The best views ran north across the savanna and over 40 acres of permanently undeveloped land, but north-facing glass in Minnesota means cold-facing glass, going against the conventional practice of saving most glazing for the south.

"Growing up in the Caribbean, the indoors and outdoors are blurred," Johnson says of the clients, "but in Minnesota there's a hard separation." The answer was lots of glass and generous openings to maintain those visual connections year-round. "So you don't feel cooped up all the time," he says.

But the 20-foot glazed opening they designed for the north wall became one of the build's most demanding technical achievements. The team worked closely with the window manufacturer to specify glazing suited to that orientation and decided on bifold doors that swing outward.

An outward swinging door, it turns out, has a practical advantage in a cold climate: it tightens against its gaskets when wind pushes on it from outside, producing a tighter seal than an inswing door, ensuring that a generous opening doesn't become a source of leaks through a Minnesota winter.

Appert's team then engineered a spanning steel beam above that wall assembly, to essentially hold it up. But to keep the system functional, the beam could not dip more than  a sixteenth of an inch; what Appert says is effectively zero. 

"It was a pretty intense detail," he says, which required thickening the entire wall to hide the steel assembly and accommodate shade pockets and the proper depth the system's clerestory windows required. 

The engineering becomes nearly invisible. In summer, with the doors folded open, the great room and patio read as a single continuous space; in winter, the system stays tightly sealed.  

Indoor Personality

Against that crisp backdrop, Martha O'Hara Interiors decided that the home would mark its personality with the interiors.

The great room sets the tone with white oak floors, a Venetian plaster fireplace surround with a soapstone mantle, a custom rail catwalk overhead, and that vertical grain Douglas fir ceiling that draws the eye up through the full height of the space.

Emily Anderson, a senior designer on the project, describes clients who were unusually willing to take bigger design risks. "They knew from the get-go they were not afraid of color," she says, "and we were to take that and run with it."

The dining room is paneled in the same deep teal that reappears from the front door. The primary suite closet, which serves as a passage to the bedroom, is treated as its own destination rather than just a corridor, with herringbone flooring, wallpapered ceiling, and doors painted in a deep eggplant purple drawn from the purple veining in the honed marble of the primary bath. It's a room designed so you don't forget you walked through it, Anderson says.

The sliding panel was a complex fabrication, Appert says. The wall was thickened, and hardware had to be carefully specified, because the weight of the panels was a real challenge. Thin porcelain was chosen because natural stone couldn't be milled to the required dimension. 

A back pantry adjacent to the main kitchen holds bulk storage and prep space, keeping the showpiece kitchen uncluttered, while giving the serious cook room to work.

Partners With Rapport

Elysian Fields was the third home Christopher Strom Architects and Redstone Builders had completed together at White Oaks Savanna, and the first with Martha O'Hara Interiors. The existing relationship between architect and builder smoothed the process with fewer surprises and a baseline of trust, Johnson says. O'Hara's team earned that same confidence quickly. "We continue to work with O'Hara," Johnson says. "We found a great partner."

But collaboration only goes as far as the clients let it. Anderson describes this couple as the ones you could actually take chances with (think of the purple marble, the eggplant-stained closet, the teal dining room). Johnson agrees, saying a project of this scale is a major leap of faith on the part of any client. It's faith in the vision, in the team, and in the early decisions that won't be visible until the house is nearly finished. This couple, he says, stayed true to it all.

Builder: Redstone Builders

Architect: Christopher Strom Architects

Interior Design: Martha O'Hara Interiors

Bifold Doors/Windows: Anderson Windows