Light-filled Duluth house designed by prominent Minnesota architect lists for $1.9 million

When Julie and Jeff Rogers moved to Duluth from Rochester a few years ago with their four children, they initially planned to buy property and have a home built on it. And they wanted to work with David Salmela, who’s perhaps Minnesota’s most renowned architect and winner of dozens of state and national awards.

So when the couple saw that a Salmela house was on the market in Duluth, they spotted a chance to gather ideas they could apply in their own home.

“We went to tour it just to get inspired,” Julie said.

The home was in Salmela’s signature clean-lined, light-filled modernist style, finished with natural materials such as slate, cedar and maple. As the Rogers walked around, noting features that would be good fit for their family, they realized something.

They could just buy this very house.

“There was a spot to put the kids' backpacks, a spot to put the kids’ homework,” she said. “You could just see the flow of how a family would function there ... There were some really cool architectural elements that we wouldn’t have thought of. Honestly, it’s probably a better house than we would have built.”

They bought the place in 2022. But the Rogers have since returned to Rochester to be closer to family, and for Julie’s job as an anesthesiologist. Jeff manages real estate investments. Both are 42.

They have listed the house at $1.9 million.

The five-bedroom house is 5,334 square feet and stands on a lot of almost two acres.

It has an open kitchen, spacious foyer, fireplace and three-room primary suite. A partially below-grade level features a wet bar, entertainment center and workout space. The house also has a three-car garage and heated workshop.

But perhaps its most striking feature is its many large windows.

“If you’re on the first floor of the primary living space and turn all the way around, you can see pretty much 360 degrees,” Julie said. Thanks to the home’s cantilevered shape (the second floor is about 75 square feet larger than the main floor), you can stand next to a big window and “you feel like you’re floating over the trees.”

The cantilevered shape also shields the south-facing windows from direct sunlight in the summer, said Paul Johnson, a structural engineer who worked with Salmela on the house and then lived in it with his family after it was built in 2009.

“David Salmela is a wonderful person to work with, both as a client and as your own personal architect, so we gave him pretty much free rein to design around the criteria that we’d established,” Johnson said. “He came up with the idea that we need more square footage upstairs than we need on the main level.”

Johnson also had a family; his three boys were then in high school. Family-friendly features also include storage cabinets and a long desk off the kitchen on the main floor. A guest room in the home’s other wing let the Johnsons host friends visiting for Grandma’s Marathon and, for two years, an exchange student from China.

“We wanted something for the boys to be able to have friends over,” he said. “We hosted every soccer, baseball, basketball, cross-country team, every team dinner, every spring meeting, fall meeting, whatever. It was all about having stuff for the high-school age kids.” (His sons are now 21, 28 and 30.)

Some homes, Johnson said, are designed for business dinners and other formal entertaining. This one worked for entertaining of a less formal kind, such as “50 high school kids.”

“It was challenge to get all the Crock-Pots together to make the spaghetti you needed, but that’s what made it fun,” he said.

Elements of the home’s design presented some structural challenges, Johnson said. The windows are triple-paned for energy efficiency, as well as extra strength. “That’s one of David’s sort of guiding principals, to get light from all sides.”

The Rogers appreciated all the glass. “You definitely feel connected to the outdoors,” Jeff said.

The house is next to Hartley Park, a 640-acre area with a nature center and 10 miles of trails. The house trailhead is just down the street — the Rogers' entryway to hiking, mountain biking and, in winter, fat-tire biking. In summer, the kids attended camps at Hartley Nature Center.

The home’s own backyard offers trails that the Rogers’ kids —7-year-old twins, a 9 year-old and an 11-year-old — liked to bike around.

A wildflower garden with raspberries on the home’s south side offers “a really beautiful view from the windows,” Julie said. “I would sit out there with my kids and read and watch all the birds.”

Tracy Ramsay of Re/Max Results (218-390-6747, tracy@tracyramsay.com) has the $1.9 million listing.