Prairie School house on Stillwater’s Lily Lake listed for $825K

When brothers Tom, Paul and Joe Kiolbasa recall their years growing up in a house on Lily Lake in Stillwater, they emphasize the fun they had.

In summer, they fished and boated, even foraged for wild raspberries and asparagus. In winter, they rode inner tubes down their steep yard onto the ice. Even household chores are fond memories.

“My mom was huge on keeping the windows clean,” 68-year-old Paul Kiolbasa said. “While other kids were watching Saturday morning cartoons, we were washing windows.”

And there were a lot of windows. The family’s home, built in 1965, was an early design from the late Michael McGuire, a prominent Stillwater architect and Frank Lloyd Wright devotee.

The exterior walls are mostly glass, intended to connect the interior with the surrounding landscape, which is a key trait of the Prairie School style Wright and McGuire practiced.

“You feel like you’re almost part of the lake when you looked out there,” Kiolbasa said.

He’s not sure why parents Ed and Maxine hired an architect rather than buying “a little more conventional house.” But he said the house was his dad’s ”pride and joy."

Maxine Kiolbasa died 32 years ago. Ed died in December at age 99. So their sons have listed the home at $825,000.

The three-bedroom, 3,242-square-foot house sits on almost an acre of land. It has a lot of brick and wood, natural materials that characterized McGuire’s style.

Those materials also “shaped ceilings to give some volume and bring natural light deeper into the house,” said a colleague of McGuire’s, Minneapolis architect Rosemary McMonigal.

“I consider Mike the most influential architect in the St. Croix Valley,” McMonigal said. “He encouraged other architects to design with respect for the land and honesty of materials.”

Those in Stillwater know McGuire for turning a grain elevator set for potential demolition into residential and retail space that also held his studio and an indoor rock-climbing wall. McGuire also turned a riverfront car wash into a popular café and designed homes around Minnesota, Wisconsin and several other states. He died last year at 95 years old.

Even as kids, the Kiolbasa boys appreciated some of the home’s architectural elements.

“It’s placed so well on the lot, and the windows are just tremendous,“ said Joe Kiolbasa, 64, who spent 15 years as a service and sales representative for Stillwater-area company Andersen Windows. ”You’re on a hill looking south so in wintertime, so when the sun is low in the sky, light is just streaming into the house."

In the summer, when the sun is high in the sky, he said, large overhangs help shield the interior from the heat.

“I do remember my parents meeting with Mike McGuire,” said Tom Kolbasa, the oldest at 71. “We were asked if we wanted our own bedroom or wanted to share a room, and all three of us were unanimous in wanting to share a room.”

These days, Paul and Joel Kiolbasa still live in Stillwater, while their older brother resides in Encinitas, Calif.

Their childhood room was in the lower level, next to a game room with ping pong and pool tables. Their parents had the primary bedroom on the main floor next to the garage. That was so when their dad, a doctor, answered an emergency call late at night, he could go out without disturbing the kids.

The first-floor location also helped their dad stay in the house as he aged, Joe Kiolbasa said.

Also on the main floor: a big brick fireplace with a large opening in the living room and a smaller corner one that opens to the kitchen and adjoining family room.

The brick holds a built-in shelf for cookbooks and an unusual feature: a working charcoal grill with a fan the brothers said is strong enough to make the grill safe for indoor use.

“You could grill steaks right next to the [kitchen] table,” Joe Kiolbasa said.

The kitchen also has windows opening to the porch, which the family used to hand food and dishes back and forth during outdoor gatherings.

“We had a lot of summer dinners out on the porch, eating fish,” Paul Kiolbasa said.

They often caught the fish themselves, as many of the brothers’ memories involve fishing in the 51-foot-deep lake. They’d fish off the shore, from a neighbor’s dock and on a small boat their father owned. Largemouth bass, northern pike and crappies were plentiful.

In later years, Lily Lake’s water became “a great example of an urban lake in distress,” said Mike Lyner, president of Friends of Lily Lake, a local organization that worked to clean it.

The city banned boats with motors from Lily Lake and installed rain gardens around the shore to filter runoff from streets and parking lots, Lyner said.

Now the lake is popular for kayaking and canoeing. People fish there year around, and the community plows parts in winter for skating. The beach remains closed, but swimming is allowed.

So it’s primed for another family like the Kiolbasas to generate more memories.

“Just having the lake in the backyard was huge,” Tom Kiolbasa said. “I remember countless times coming home from school, running through the house and down to lake to go fishing.”

Michael Boege (651-325-7419, MWBoege@cbburnet.com) and Abigail Dean (651-226-6035, Abby.Dean@cbburnet.com), both of Coldwell Banker Realty, have the $825,000 listing.