Architect turns client when fixing up 100-year-old Minneapolis bungalow

Before they owned this Bryn Mawr bungalow, Bryan Anderson and Scott Horsfall were guests of it.

“Our friends lived here and used to host a lot of parties, ” Anderson said. “Just the other day, a Facebook Memory from the early 2000s popped up of Scott and me in the house.”

When those friends moved out of Minnesota 15 years ago, Anderson and Horsfall seized the opportunity to purchase the charming 1,100-square-foot home. The house, which has a private backyard, is on a quiet street near Theodore Wirth Regional Park, the chain of lakes and several trails.

“We used to be big runners, so that was important,” Horsfall said.

Another appealing quality was the layout of the 1925 bungalow: two wings flanking a central living room, sort of like a courtyard that acts as a buffer between the kitchen and the sleeping areas.

From the exterior, the arrangement is just as pleasing. There’s a recessed front porch with French windows and a unique roofline consisting of a pair of gabled roofs that extend toward the street from either side of a central hip roof.

The hip portion turned out to be the cloud and the silver lining in Anderson and Horsfall’s recent renovation, which earned a 2025-26 Home of the Month honor from the Minnesota Star Tribune and the Minnesota chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

The pandemic convinced them to finish the job and address the home’s lingering issues, including that wayward wall, the home’s single, cramped bathroom and a few inefficient closets.

Anderson, an architect with SALA Architects, had been mulling solutions to these issues practically since the day they bought the home.

“I created a 3D digital model of the house and had been playing with different options over the years,” he said.

The bathroom was a pretty straightforward gut job. They replaced the rotting window and swapped the chipped bathtub with a roomy walk-in shower by borrowing space from the guest room closet. A new wall-mounted toilet freed up twelve valuable inches of floor space, making the bathroom easier to clean and navigate.

Inches mattered in the bedrooms, too. The guest bedroom (now sans closet) features a wall of custom cabinetry and a Murphy bed so the room can flex for overnight guests or as a home office. ​Another wall of cabinetry replaced the primary bedroom closet, as its door had previously hit the bed when opened​. The integrated storage in both rooms eliminated the need for freestanding dressers, freeing up floor space for circulation.

Inadequate framing had caused the south wall to move away from the roof, resulting in ugly cracks.

“The ceiling joists, which typically tie rafters together in the ceiling or attic floor plane, ran perpendicular to the rafters in our house, which made the unsupported roof and wall intersection more vulnerable to movement,” Anderson said

The solution required removing the flat living room ceiling to reinforce the existing rafters and add new interior ties. At this point, the couple could have reinstalled a flat ceiling over the new framework. But Anderson had other ideas.

He worked with the drywall carpenters to follow the hipped roof’s four-sided geometry, adding a light well and south-facing skylight at the top to channel natural light into the space. The result is a unique vaulted ceiling that transforms the living room (and, kind of, the whole house, given the room’s central location) into a larger-feeling, brighter space.

While the ceiling was open, Anderson had the contractors spray a low-global-warming-potential (low-GWP) polyurethane foam into the walls to make the house more energy efficient. In the attic space, they used a combination of spray foam to air-seal the ceiling and cellulose, with added ventilation chutes to minimize the risk of ice dams.

Although Anderson has been with SALA Architects for more than 20 years and led dozens of residential projects, he’d never been on the client side of a project this big.

“The experience has no doubt increased my empathy for clients,” Anderson said. “We had to relocate for six months. We opened and paid construction invoices, and we had to consider when and how far to stretch our budget. All were valuable experiences for my practice.”

Designing firm: SALA Architects

Project team: Bryan Anderson, AIA

Project partners: Terra Firma Building and Remodeling