Houzz Tours
Houzz Tour: A New Take on a Shingle-Style Classic
A wraparound porch, coffered ceilings and lavender hues help make this family home a star
On a secluded corner lot in a busy suburb of Minneapolis, architect Andrea Swan helped a newly blended family create a Shingle-style home they could call their own. The homeowner came to the project from a house in Connecticut, where she decided on much of the decor in collaboration with famed interior designer Michael Smith. “She applied a lot of lessons learned and decor she loved to this home,” says Swan, who got help from interior designer Martha O’Hara. The result is a victory of teamwork and an ode to timeless style.
A Shingle-style home with signature gable forms, the house has shingles only on its roof, as the homeowners opted for durable HardiePanel lap siding. On the side, the French doors open to a three-season living room. The homeowner requested “simple, robust, square columns,” Swan says. “We gave them well-proportioned refabricated caps and bases of a nonwood composite to handle the moisture created by snow and rain.” The all-white house has windows trimmed in black.
The home’s front entrance features a barrel vault ceiling with tongue-and-groove beadboard stained a dark walnut color. The entry’s floor is ipe, a rainforest hardwood. “Because of all of the French doors opening onto the wraparound porch, the house appears to be open all along the front, so we wanted to clearly denote the entry,” Swan says. Porch columns and zinc planters also help demarcate the space.
The formal dining room lies directly off the front entry. The French doors open to the wraparound porch. Cross beams spanning two directions create a coffered ceiling, which aligns with the kitchen sink and island, and connects with the living room. “This style of ceiling brings in layers of tradition to add to the house’s cottage feel,” Swan says. Most of the furnishings are the client’s own, brought from Connecticut.
The dining room and living room flow together because of the coffered ceiling, French doors, pops of purples and gold, and bold patterns. “The client’s favorite color is lavender,” Swan says. The TV is embedded in the fireplace wall. Columns on either side of the gas fireplace resemble those on the exterior of house, “bringing the outside in,” Swan says.
Sightlines throughout the first level are clear: The kitchen island aligns with the fireplace. Wraparound windows to the south and east bring plentiful light into this family hub. Since most of the walls are windows, Swan says, creating storage meant using glass corner cabinets (“so light can reflect off the glass”) with plentiful ergonomic drawers below. She also included storage in the island.
The island has a custom-fit Coldspring granite top. To create opportunities for conversation, Swan designed the island to have seating on two sides. “It’s not very family-friendly to have four chairs in a row,” she says. The column motif that began on the exterior and continued around the fireplace in the living room is repeated here in the island. The countertops are quartzite from Brazil. The backsplash is a handmade clay tile. The white oak floor was custom-stained to a dark tone.
For the butler’s pantry, the client asked to reverse the color scheme by using dark cabinets instead of white, with quartzite countertops. Floor-to-ceiling storage fulfills any needs not met in the kitchen. The homeowner also keeps her formal dishware and glassware for entertaining here. The narrow pantry terminates in a desk, which is the homeowners’ “command center,” Swan says.
The screened porch, with a fireplace of Chilton stone, faces south. This area and the front entrance bookend the wraparound porch, one of the home’s most significant features. In the screened porch, swinging daybeds and comfortable seating communicate a relaxed setting for reading or conversing. “It’s a very intimate space, just 12 by 12 [feet],” Swan says. The columns here are white, in contrast to the black board ceiling and black-painted screens, “so the columns help the space read and feel like an open porch,” Swan says.
Because the “second floor morphs out of the roof form,” Swan says, the upper level has lots of nooks and spaces for dedicated purposes. In one of them, at the top of the stairs, Swan inserted a desk for the kids. Simple glass-topped MDF cabinets and a lively wallpaper background convey stylish utility.
Swan “slid the bedrooms under the roof forms, which the family loves,” she says. “They were looking for that. It helps exude the nestled-in, cottage style.” The daughter “had a lot of fun with her bedroom,” Swan says, by including a circular chair suspended from the ceiling as well as accessories bursting with color and pattern.
Throughout the house, “millwork like beadboard ceilings and crown molding helps convey the home’s cottage-y, Shingle-style aesthetic,” Swan says. A new take on a classic, the home has an integration of interior and exterior spaces largely made possible by the traditional feature connecting them: the wraparound porch. And the open floor plan emphasizes living areas inside and out as a focus for the family and the heart of the home.
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Houzz at a Glance:
Who lives here: A couple with three teenage children
Location: Edina, Minnesota
Designers: Andrea Swan of Swan Architecture and Martha O’Hara of Martha O’Hara Interiors
The corner lot gave Swan a fantastic opportunity to create a wraparound porch for the home. French doors along the front and side of the house open to the porch, which receives lots of use. “The wraparound porch also creates a buffer to the street. The porch is like a visor hat … a buffer and layer of space,” Swan says. To introduce an element of the expected, Swan added a dormer bump-out over the round window (which is in the homeowner’s dressing room).