Award-winning ‘very urban’ lake house in the Wisconsin woods lists for $4M

The aptly named Type/Variant house is ever-changing.

Built in 1994, the copper siding-clad home was shiny and brown. As it aged, the copper oxidized, giving the panels their own patina, some a blue-green, others a deep brown.

Client Richard Polsky and Minneapolis architect Vincent James drew inspiration from rural industrial structures in Wisconsin and Minnesota, envisioning each cubic part of the home as simple, elegant timber-like features.

“We selected copper siding after seeing one of [Polsky’s] artworks — a beautiful copper etching composing a set of plates of simple variations,” James said in an email. “They loved the evolving copper color as it weathered and that the changes were outside of their control.”

The home, which won the American Institute of Architects Honor Award for Architecture in 1998 as well as the American Institute of Architects Minnesota Honor Award in 1996, even garnered a New York Times feature for its ingenuity and modernist look. After decades of enjoying all that the seven-bedroom, nine-bathroom home has to offer — from its artistic forms to fishing on the nearby lake and tapping maple trees on the property — the Polsky family recently listed the Hayward, Wis., home for $4 million and hope to find buyers who will relish it the same.

“[Us kids have] spread out quite a bit over the years. It was a place for my parents to go every summer. It was getting harder for them to get there,” said Polsky’s son Charlie Polsky. “It’s sad that the house is for sale. But it’s a house that needs to be used.”

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Richard Polsky always had grander ideas for his land in Hayward, about a 2½-hour drive northeast of the Twin Cities. A professor at Columbia University, he interviewed artists and was interested in how they expressed their views creatively.

“My father, who is turning 93 this year, is a lifelong artist and has been interested in aesthetic and space for a long time,” Charlie Polsky said. “We started interviewing architects in the mid-’90s, and he had a vision for what the house should be in terms of materials and how it is built.”

There were times when Charlie Polsky and his siblings thought their father’s ideas were a little bizarre, especially when Richard Polsky found a fifth-century mosaic at an antiquities store and wanted to install it in the floor of the foyer.

“We thought he was crazy. It was a piece that looked like it should be on a wall,” Charlie Polsky said. “But that’s this house. It’s a series of contradictions, mixing the very old with the very new. The very urban with the woods.”

Spanning 6,950 square feet, the home has Douglas fir finishes and a blue stone slate flooring. Each bedroom has its own views with windows facing different directions, so there’s still privacy despite the home’s modular form, Charlie Polsky added.

“This house was built with the workmanship and artistry and materials no one would [have] rationally gotten at the time,” he said. “It’s a work of art in and of itself.”

There are two towers that connect to the main block through the home’s roof terrace and through a bridge over the courtyard. For one of the towers, there’s also a basement connection that leads to the main block. A bedroom at the top of one tower feels light and airy — almost like being in an eagle’s nest — and the family affectionally calls the other tower “mystery object” because the windows face away from the lake, something most architects would not do, James said.

“It was doing something for some unknown reason and not what was expected,” he said.

The home’s name, Type/Variant, stems from all the features at play together, James said.

“The clients collected many things in series that became a topic of our discussions,” James said. “The house was designed as a set of simple forms composed as a group, each providing a unique vista of the forest and lake.”

In 1999, three years after the home’s completion, the New York Times called it “unabashedly modern” in the rustic woods. The untreated copper siding cost about four times as much as wood cladding, according to the article. It also compared the simple interior lined in Douglas Fir to looking like a gigantic sauna.

“It was really one part Vincent James and another equal part was my father’s vision,” Charlie Polsky said. “The two did a give and take of ideas.”

Richard Polsky used to travel to Hayward in the 1930s from Chicago to a fishing club. As travel by airplane became more accessible, membership at the club petered out through the years.

But Richard Polsky liked the area — and the memories he had created there as a child — so he bought the fishing club building along with the land. Charlie Polsky remembers before the Type/Variant house, the family would stay at the old fishing club that had plenty of rooms, a dining hall and locker storage for all their gear.

Sitting on almost 9½ acres of land, the property doesn’t include the old building now. It does, however, include a dock on Lac Courte Oreilles, and 9 acres of woods that have plenty of never-before-tapped maple trees, Charlie Polsky said.

“My dad is sad we’re selling the house. He poured his heart and soul into it, but he understands,” Charlie Polsky said. “All things have their season.”

Listing agent Victor Sacco(715-645-0832, VictorSacco@edinarealty.com) of Edina Realty has the $4 million listing.