HOME TOUR
Wow! What a crazy and wild time to be alive! With everything going on with the coronavirus outbreak, we’ve been doing everything we can to socially distance ourselves and stay home. This has been such a difficult and heartbreaking time for so many people around the world and our thoughts are with each and every person affected.
We always love to offer our house as a gathering place and we love entertaining friends and family, so it’s definitely been a little quiet for our liking. That being said, this time at home has allowed us to complete a lot of those spring projects that we’ve been putting off. It’s been awhile since we shared any images of our house, so we wanted to show you a whole bunch of never-before-seen images and share what we’ve been working on as of late!
We’ve shown you our front porch before, but we wanted to show you this incredible pair of antique skis that we found stored away in the rafters of our garage! Tay cleaned them up and oiled the wood and we decided to display them on our front porch! We can’t wait for it to warm up a bit more out on the porch so we can take long afternoon naps and eat dinners out on the table with all of the windows open!
Stepping in from the porch you enter into our main living area. We tried to keep this area very true to the craftsman/mission style. We love popping a fire in the fireplace, turning on some music, and relaxing in this cozy space.
A friend recently asked us if we could help them purchase art for their house. Purchasing art is probably one of the most difficult and intimate things you can do for a home. We have a wide variety of art in a wide variety of price points throughout our home, and building this collection has taken years! It is so difficult to bulk-buy pieces of art for a home that we actually told our friend that we weren’t able to help them out. Instead, we encouraged them to do what we did which is spend hours scouring through antique stores, estate sales, discovering new artists online, and slowly accumulating a collection that is uniquely our own. The joy in filling a home with art is the search required to find the perfect pieces of art that speak to you and your space. Tay has been searching for months for a piece of art that would remind him of his hometown in Wisconsin. He knew he wanted a rural/farm scene, but was having a really difficult time finding the perfect one. While perusing Facebook Marketplace one day, he found it! It was being sold by a women in south Minneapolis for $15. Art doesn’t have to be expensive to be hung in your home. It doesn’t have to be by a famous artist. To be honest, this piece is a little off. It’s clunky and childish, but for some reason it spoke to Taylor. He wasn’t sure why, but it was exactly what he had been looking for. He brought it home and hung it in the living room and we totally love it!
Tay here with a fun side story: There is a small note on the back of the frame. It has the artist’s name, address and phone number. After doing some digging, I realized that the artist would be 103 years old if he were still living. His name was Howard H. Bennett. After doing some more research, I found two additional pieces by Howard that he had sold to a woman while he was visiting a WWII air force buddy in Toronto. I kept digging and was able to track down Howard’s son, so I called him and explained the situation and how I came to own the painting. He said he didn’t know that his father painted but that his grandfather, Ben Bennett, was an avid painter. Then I got to thinking… was this painting actually by Howard’s father, Ben Bennett, and much older than I had originally thought — could this painting be closer to 150-years-old? I then looked back at the two pieces that are now located in Toronto and both were signed by Howard H. Bennett. So my only conclusion is that Howard followed in his father’s footsteps and also enjoyed painting, but maybe never told his children about his hobby. I am still waiting on a call back from a few other family members that might have more information on the painting. I would love to know if the red barn is a significant place for the painter. Howard’s son did say that Howard grew up in South Dakota and later moved to Minneapolis when he joined the military. Perhaps this is Howard’s childhood farm. More on this story later! Onward!
Adjacent to our living room is our office, which has very quickly become one of our favorite spaces in our home. The office is the sunniest room in our house and nothing makes us feel more optimistic and productive than a bright and sunny work environment. Even once we’ve finished our work tasks for the day, we still find ourselves in the office soaking up some vitamin D, tending to the bonsai/seedlings, or catching up on reading. If you had told us a year ago the office would become one of our favorite spaces in our home, we would’ve told you that you were crazy! This is the beauty of our relationships with our homes -- they are constantly evolving and exposing new facets/vignettes that we may have previously overlooked.
Speaking of Bonsai, Taylor recently purchased a Fukien Tea Bonsai tree and has been OBSESSED with learning everything he can about his new hobby. His tree is still in the development stage and he is currently using fertilizer and a grow light to encourage lots of new growth. Once there is a substantial amount of new growth and the tree is very healthy, he can begin to refine its shape through pruning and wiring techniques! Enough nerdy Bonsai talk. Back to the tour!
When we last shared some images from our house, the dining room was still covered in 1980s wallpaper. Well, we’ve since finished the wallpaper and couldn’t be happier. We installed Bradbury & Bradbury handprinted 1920s Arts & Crafts reproduction paper and it couldn’t have turned out more perfect in the space! This is the type of paper that would have been in the house when it was built and we love that we were able to inject some period character back into the home.
Upstairs in the landing off of the master bedroom, we decided to go with an eclectic and whimsical theme. In addition to the cat painting by Taylor’s niece Piper, Shane has a collection of art pieces that were created by children with cancer during their stays at the hospital. Shane buys a painting every year at The Pine Tree Apple Orchard Tennis Classic. The money raised from the auction of these pieces of art is used to fund children’s cancer research at Children’s Hospital here in St. Paul, MN. This cause is very near and dear to us, and we love buying a new piece each year to add to our collection!
Oh, and can we just talk about this 1960s mid-century modern sofa!? Another Facebook Marketplace purchase! Taylor is kind of a thrifting wizard. Fun fact: Almost all of the furniture in our home was purchased secondhand from Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, or antique stores! We love to buy pieces with a story and aren’t afraid of a little patina!
Speaking of patina, let’s head back downstairs to show you our guest room! We’ve never shown this room before because to be honest, it’s not finished yet. Someone took the liberty to spray the ENTIRE room with popcorn texture, so we will be removing that texture in the near future. We used to be embarrassed to show the rooms in our house that aren’t finished, but we’re done caring! This is a 100-year-old house and with a house of that age, there are bound to be some trouble areas. So, we invite you to ingest our popcorn walls in all of their glory and add a little butter if you see fit!
We loved the 1960s Marimekko print the second we saw it! As you can tell from seeing more of the house, we love the color orange! It’s so weird though — we never wear the color orange, yet our house is full of it!
The last room we want to show you is our bedroom! We are on the lookout for a huge piece of driftwood or a tree branch for above the bed. We want to bring a natural element into the room as everything right now is pretty rigid, but we have yet to find the perfect piece. We love our bedroom and Shane’s big ass bed provides plenty of space for us to share the bed with Barley!
This diptych is by 1960s collage artist and Minnesota native, Mary Helen Horty. We’ve been talking for years about how we want to get them framed, so maybe we’ll just leave them as is.
Well, that’s all we’re going to show you for now. Barley is ready to go for a walk, so we’ve got to be done writing. We love you and hope you’re staying safe and healthy out there! See you next time!
Love,
Shane, Taylor & Barley