Historic Deephaven Home Restored

How do you transform a house but preserve it at the same time? How do you take an old-fashioned, endlessly subdivided space and turn it into something sweeping, open and modern, all without compromising its essential character? Just ask architecture-slash-design team of Jon and Mary Monson. Their radically redesigned Deephaven lake home looks better than good—it looks like it belongs.

"We wanted to be faithful to what it was, yet at the same time rework it so we could live here the way we wanted to live," Jon Monson says. He stands in his wife's sun-drenched office. The room, with its high ceiling and tall, slender windows, is suffused with a clear, pale light. The family dog, Ivy, a 9-year-old Bichon Frise, is curled up on a cozy-looking armchair, caught by a sunbeam, her white fur aglow.

"This used to be the cook's bedroom," he says, gesturing around him. "All of this was walls. What was most noticeable about this house is that you were at the lake but you didn't even know it."

The house itself dates back to 1892, but was extensively remodeled in 1941. The simple shingle cottage was renovated, winterized and transformed into a Colonial Revival-style home—but it was also highly compartmentalized and closed off from its surroundings.

Monson walks from room to room, pointing out where he and Mary added windows and knocked down walls. The formal dining room and tucked-away kitchen have given way to an open floor plan that subtly separates a large, modern kitchen from a large, open living room, utilizing columns and ceiling treatments to distinguish the spaces.

In the living room, the original windows were saved to showcase the 70-year-old poured glass. "Only two of those windows were on that elevation," he says. Two were moved from around the corner and one was moved in from the den. Even the door that leads out to the lake yard is from 1941. Monson points to the ceiling. "There's a big steel beam up here that holds half the house up so we didn't have to have corners or columns. We made a lot of changes, but hopefully done in a way that you don't realize, that's in keeping with the house's character."

Upstairs, the open floor plan continues. The four small, virtually windowless bedrooms from the 1941 remodel were broken up into a large master bedroom, bathroom, multi-room walk-in closet and laundry room, and a small guest bedroom. The rooms blend together seamlessly but nevertheless feel distinct and separate.

Even the attic has been opened up. Once an unfinished space full of dust and bare rafters (and only accessible by a pull-down ladder), the attic is now a playroom and bedroom for the couple's grandchildren. Here, in perhaps the renovation's cutest touch, four tot-sized beds rest under the attic's tent-like eaves. Designed by Monson and modeled after the barrack bunks at Fort Snelling, they are painted a historically accurate Prussian blue, and the sheets are tucked in with military precision.

Share this Article

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•