City home gets farm fresh transformation

Homeowners planning to remodel often seek inspiration by looking at other people's houses.

Not Bruce Chamberlain. He looked at old barns.

"I've always had a fascination with them," he said. He attributes it, in part, to growing up on an organic dairy farm near Hastings. But he appreciates distinctive barns wherever he can find them.

"I've done a lot of traveling through Europe, and it sounds a little geeky, but I seek out barns," he said.

When Chamberlain bought a house in Minneapolis' Linden Hills neighborhood 14 years ago, he chose a 1914 Dutch Colonial, an architectural style sometimes referred to as a "barn house," for its distinctive gambrel roof.

"I loved the character, the bones of the house," he recalled, although it was due for an update. "Very little work had been done on it. It was really tired. But that was great -- it hadn't been ruined by bad remodeling."

He lived in the house "as is" for the first two years. "I wanted ideas to incubate," he said.

Chamberlain analyzed "great old barns" and their features, then incorporated those elements into his plans, including dormers and a side entry redesigned as a sliding barn door below a transom window.

"The design intent was urban farmstead," he said. "I wanted to walk the delicate line between historic integrity and modern convenience."

Chamberlain, a landscape architect with Hoisington Koegler Group, also planned to tackle his remodeling the old-fashioned rural way, doing most of the hands-on work himself. Growing up on the farm, he lived in the house that his grandfather built, and learned construction "by osmosis," he said.

So about 12 years ago, he "jumped right in," beginning the long process of gutting and rebuilding the second floor and re-siding the exterior with radial-sawn clapboards and cedar shakes.

Once he started digging into his house, he decided there was something uncomfortable about the second floor. It was the ceilings, which were sagging about 6 inches, he discovered. To remedy that and open up the master bedroom, Chamberlain created a vaulted ceiling with cross ties made from resawn Douglas fir reclaimed from old warehouse buildings.

Doing the work himself meant the project "took a long time," he said, but his lifestyle at the time accommodated a drawn-out construction schedule. "I was single when I bought it, so I could live under a blue tarp for a while, which I did."

By the time Chamberlain was ready to tackle the next phase of his remodeling, he was married. He and his wife, Melissa Mrachek, wanted to make the most of their 1,200 square feet of space, so Chamberlain rebuilt the front porch and added a back porch to match it, with a deck on top. Next came gutting and rebuilding the main level, turning a former buffet nook into a back-porch entry, and a dark pantry into a light-filled reading nook.

"We took off the woodwork and labeled it, so we could put it back," Chamberlain said. "Melissa was very involved in that. The house was basically taken apart and reassembled."

The most recent upgrade, in 2008, involved gutting and remodeling the kitchen, building a new garage with a workshop, a green roof and play loft for the couple's son, Ben, now 2, and adding hardscape outdoors.

This time, Chamberlain had more professional help, including hiring stonemasons to build the stone walls, and artist David Culver to create limestone "ruins" in their back yard. The couple also hired professionals to install the tile backsplash in their kitchen.

They may expand the house someday, when budget permits, and have commissioned plans for an addition. For now it works for them. "We've used every nook and cranny. It's very livable," Chamberlain said.

And when strangers who admire the house strike up a conversation, they get an old-fashioned rural welcome.

"The nicest compliment is when people drive by, circle around, then ask if they can see it," Chamberlain said.

Some even get out of their cars and knock on his door, asking for a look. Does he oblige them? "Oh, yeah, absolutely!" he said. "We love that, that people are interested."