Creative couple restore 1920 Italianate Minneapolis mansion into dreamy live-work space

Old houses have stories to tell homeowners who are willing to listen.

Scars on the floor where walls used to be, doorways covered by wallboard, coins, photographs or other relics under decades-old flooring serve as reminders that others came before — others who made changes, celebrated life and loved that wallpaper you're bad-mouthing as you steam it off. And all the while, the house endures.

That was the appeal for Liz Gardner and her partner, Josef Harris, when they purchased this 1920 Italianate six years ago. Ernest Kennedy, a prominent architect with many distinguished homes to his credit, including the Pillsbury Castle a half-mile away, designed the 3,885-square-foot house in the Stevens Square historic district.

The building had housed offices since the 1960s, but the couple recognized the beauty of its curved marble staircase, wavy glass windows and abundant natural light. They suspected they would find more good stuff behind the fluorescent lights and drop ceilings.

"We were open to discover what the house wanted to tell us," Gardner said.

Owners of creative agency Bodega Ltd., Gardner and Harris planned to use the house as a live-work space, reasoning that having clients see the restoration would help illustrate their approach. "Let them walk around in the way we think," Gardner explained.

It was a dreamy vision with a formidable reality. Wood floors covered with sticky tarpaper or linoleum, windows in desperate need of restoration, concrete walls hidden beneath wallboard, paint and wallpaper that, once finally exposed, promised to be a bear to run electrical wiring through. And there was no kitchen. It would require a ton of work, much of it by hand.

Lucky for them, they had extra muscle — Gardner's dad, Jim Nelson, and her late mother, Billie, forward thinkers who raised Gardner and her brother on a 240-acre farm in Mora, Minn., that they restored from neglected cropland to native prairie, a process that took 10 years.

"My parents modeled the type of stewardship this house required and contributed a huge amount of work and support," Gardner said.

Intentionally forgoing a master plan, Gardner and Harris decided to take it slow and see what demolition revealed before deciding how to divvy up the space and do what was best for them and the house.

For six months, they tore out industrial carpet, hollow-core doors, drop ceilings, fluorescent lights, commercial hand-towel dispensers, fax and phone wires and other remnants of decades of office use, doing the work themselves and with the help of family.

Once the house was stripped bare, the couple saw it in full for the first time — how the light streamed in and bounced off the staircase, plaster walls and high ceilings and changed throughout the day. Demolition also uncovered evidence of the original kitchen: a gas pipe in the wall and a door to pass ice from outside to inside.

Gardner and Harris began to see how the rooms related to one another and, working with architect Toby Rapson, were ready to create a comprehensive plan for the house, drawing inspiration from Rapson's hand-drawn sketches.

Since the house didn't have a kitchen, Gardner had the luxury of choosing the location and creating one from scratch. And it is a knockout.

Selecting the brightest corner of the house, she and Rapson designed a kitchen that allows the light to move freely around the room — using recessed plaster niches instead of upper cabinets that could block the light and unlacquered brass on the lower cabinets to bounce it to glowy advantage.

A fluted wood island with refrigerator drawers grounds the room. The drawers give Gardner ample, but not front and center, refrigeration for everyday cooking and the events and workshops she occasionally hosts.

Like the house, the unlacquered brass and marble countertops will show their age and develop a patina with time. The brass started bright and shiny when it was installed and now, in its fifth year, has dulled to a more interesting finish after hitting an awkward phase in between. "Sort of like growing your bangs out," Gardner said.

The couple left lines of demarcation on the plaster walls where drop ceilings once were untouched, along with other scars and penciled notes from the original builder written in cursive. "These are the fingerprints of this house," Gardner said. "We think they're beautiful."

For the exterior, they relied on guidance from an old photo of the house by Norton and Peel that Gardner found on the Minnesota Historical Society website. The restoration required replacing much of the decaying wood trim.

"The process was daunting," Gardner said. "We had crown molding milled by Hovland Lumber in Mora [she used to babysit for the family] to match the historic profile. Then the entire house was wrapped in scaffolding, and the molding was installed and painted by a crew with assistance from me and my dad."

Her mom, Billie Nelson, died from cancer in 2021, a shattering loss for Gardner. But her legacy remains in Gardner and the house.

"She was the true champion of this project, who always reminded me of the sacred responsibility of restoring a place, whether a farm or a building, to its intended vision," Gardner said.

Laurie Junker is a Twin Cities-based writer specializing in home design and architecture.