Choreographer couple convert old Minneapolis rooming house into live-work space

What you need in a live-work space depends on how you live — and what kind of work you do.

Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad, partners in life and work, needed the usual spaces, including his-and-her offices.

But as choreographers and co-directors of the Body Cartography Project (www.bodycartography.org), they also needed one unusual space — a big, wide-open living room where they could move freely and practice yoga and tai chi and rehearse for performances and other dance-related events.

To get that space, the couple gutted and remodeled the upper duplex of a century-old home in the Seward neighborhood of Minneapolis.

"Before, we rented a studio," Bieringa said. But now, after opening up their second floor and attic, they have a two-story space big enough to accommodate their yoga hammock, their preschool daughter's play equipment during the winter months and even small dance groups.

Their light-filled home also is an appealing place to do routine office chores.

"We have a lot of direct sunlight," Ramstad said. "If you have to be at home, doing administrative work, you can be moving from room to room" as the sunlight moves through the space throughout the day.

But they still had to rent a dance studio for rehearsal space. And after their daughter, Uma, now age 3, joined the family, they decided that it was time to look for a bigger home.

"We wanted a duplex again, with at least three bedrooms," Ramstad said.

Seward was their first choice for location. Ramstad grew up in the neighborhood, and his parents and several other relatives still live there. His earliest dance experiences were at the nearby community center, and Uma attends the same preschool he did.

In addition to personal connections, the neighborhood offered the amenities they were looking for, including walkability and proximity to downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul.

"When we're not traveling, we like to live local; we love to walk and bike," Bieringa said.

The duplex they found was far from perfect, but it had potential. Built as a single-family home in 1917, it had been converted into a rooming house in the 1970s or '80s and operated as one ever since.

The downstairs was a "relatively traditional" duplex, Bieringa said, but the second floor had been carved into three small apartments, each with a tiny kitchen and a shared bath in the hall. "It was little rabbit warrens," she recalled. "I said, 'I'm not moving in here unless we rip the ceiling out.' Growing up in New Zealand, I'm obsessed with light."

The couple hired a contractor (JCJ Construction) to do the framing and install new support beams, and a cabinetmaker (Siwek Lumber & Millwork) to build their kitchen cupboards, but much of the project was DIY.

Bieringa and Ramstad came up with a new design for the space themselves, drawing out the floor plan on graph paper. "The idea was to make it as simple as possible," Bieringa said.

Ramstad did the demolition, with help from his father, removing 35 pickup-truckloads of old material. He also removed and rebuilt two porches that had rotted, and did the finishing work.

"It was an amazing collection," Bieringa said. "A lot of weird objects — overalls and darned socks and bone buttons."

While those attic objects didn't find a home in the new space, other recycled materials did — scrap wood to patch the hardwood flooring and salvaged windows, including a large round one that became a focal point in their living room. It wasn't in the original plan, but after they spotted it at Bauer Brothers Salvage, they fell in love with it.

So they reached out for some long-distance, on-the-spot advice. "I was texting my family back in New Zealand," Bieringa recalled. They assured her that "a round window would be amazing," so she and Ramstad bought it and incorporated it into their plan. Luckily for them, they acted quickly; they later learned that another buyer returned to get the window and cried upon finding it gone.

The round window, placed high in the living room, brings in additional light and another vantage point that makes their dense, urban neighborhood feel almost airy. "Even though we're up next to the other houses, we can see the sunrise and sunset sitting in this room," Bieringa said. (The round window is also Uma's favorite thing in her new home.)

Doing a lot of the work himself saved a lot of money, Ramstad said, but the project still cost considerably more than they anticipated, in part because of unforeseen conditions, such as having to reinforce the ceiling. Originally budgeted at $85,000 to $90,000, the project ended up costing about $150,000 — "not including me and my dad's labor for months," he said.

"It gives us the ability to be spontaneous, to make a rehearsal open," Ramstad said. "We don't have to book a space." (They're currently working on "Closer," a series of public-space performances that will be presented this summer, culminating in a show at Red Eye Theater in Minneapolis.)

"It reduced the amount of commute time in our lives," Bieringa said. "And it's a really great space to have social events," such as hosting their advisory board or visiting artists.

The couple, who travel three months of the year, rent out their lower duplex, and also their own home, posting it on the Airbnb website, when they're out of town. During the recent Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference, they rented their home to four visiting writers while they visited friends in Wisconsin. In the fall, when they plan to visit New Zealand, a Danish doctoral student and family will live in their space.

Asked what he'd change if he had a do-over, Ramstad had to think for a while. Finally, he came up with one detail. "There's a light switch in the wrong place in the kitchen."

Kim Palmer • 612-673-4784