under round A 100-year-old boiler room becomes a 21st-century entertainment space BY EVAN REMINICK PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHAD HOLDER

The look says industrial loft. Yet the setting for this entertainment room is not an edgy downtown warehouse but a turn-of-the-century mansion

on Lowry Hill, one of Minneapolis' most stately residential enclaves. In converting a massive boiler room, the owners and their team of designers created a poised and attractive balance of utility and luxury.

The neoclassical mansion overlooking Kenwood Park was built by a member of the Lowry family-which also left its name to the neighborhood. Its solid and businesslike red brick fa<;ade remai'ns true to its 1910 vintage, but its 25,000 square foot interior was converted to luxury condos in the 1980s.

The owners of the garden-level condo acquired the former boiler room as part of their property. Hidden behind a stout door in an underground service hallway leading to the carriage house, the bunker-like space hadn't been used in years. Yet it held a special intrigue for the current owners, a professional couple that from the start eyed the basement, long stripped of its original mechanical equipment, for its expansion possibilities.

The husband imagined it a guy paradise: a centerpiece home entertainment system, a good chair or two, the rest Spartan and, well, basement-like. She wanted a beckoning family room where they could entertain 20

40 Midwest Home & Garden May 2005

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guests, as well as a sumptuous bathroom hideaway. They both thought an exercise room, and maybe a little more storage, would work well for them. But how did these public and private areas relate to one another, much less to the cobwebby, dusty bunker they had to work with?

To resolve these questions, they turned to Jeff Nicholson, a designer with Choice Wood Company of St. Louis Park. Though Choice had completed remodels of two units in the mansion and repairs to the carriage house, Nicholson was amazed by the raw space.

''I'd never seen anything that big and weird before," he says. "Sixteen-foot ceilings for a basement; the boiler they built it for must have been monstrous. It's a rare kind of space that gives a rare kind of inspiration for design."

Within the 2D-foot by 3D-foot main chamber and a handful of other side rooms, Nicholson found ample accommodations for the owner's varied program. Admittedly, altering the existing configuration was not an option,

42 Midwest Home & Garden May 2005

ABOVE The original raw concrete forms a unique backdrop for the room's warm colors and textures. OPPOSITE The Japanese-style whirlpool of poured concrete, surrounded by blue glass tile, adds to the aesthetic.

as all the walls, ceilings and floors were rather obdurate poured concrete. The tough choices, Nicholson says, lay in finishing the space.

Though the owners had assurned the remodeled rooms would be dry-walled to hide the raw concrete structure, Nicholson was able to persuade them that the board-formed walls, veined with cracks and pocked with filled-in pipe chases, could be a hallmark design attribute. Unlike most of the garden-level condo's interior, which had been heavily reworked and remodeled, the concrete "detail" was entirely authentic.

"Today people have a greater comfort level with materials like concrete and metal than in the past," says interior designer Christine Frisk, principal of Alternative Designs in Minneapolis, who collaborated with Nicholson. "\lve live in a synthetic world, and in response, industrial details once

May 2005 Midwest Home & Garden 43

hidden are now revealed because they strike us as elemental and true. But this space was really a deep, dark pit with no windows, no relief, no accommodation for enjoyment. We had to install the comfort and the human scale in a focused way to put all that concrete into a supporting role."

At focal areas in the main chamber-the mezzanine entrance and media center across the room-stained fir paneling softens and livens the walls. In the attached bathroom, light blue glass tile embraces the Japanese-style whirlpool made of poured concrete. A trough sink set in a simple wooden frame adds to the aesthetic. The nearby exercise room is simple and utilitarian.

The family room's plush furnishings balance the concrete visually and acoustically. Together with the fir panels, which are mounted to a sound-deadening board, they figure into the impeccably designed stereo-surround sound system. Speakers are hidden 111 a dropped cei li ng of meta1 mesh at the room's rea r.

44 Midwest Home & Garden May 2005

Lowry legacy In 1874, streetcar magnate Thomas Lowry built a stupendous Italianate mansion on a hillside west of Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis. The flagship home was meant to promote a new subdivision that he and a cadre of other businessmen were selling to the expanding local gentry. The neighborhood's name stuck: Lowry Hill.

Thomas Lowry's sprawling estate was sold in 1915 and later torn down to make room for the museum that would become the Walker Art Center. In the meantime his son, Horace Lowry, had built another Lowry Hill mansion-a neoclassical affair. Overlooking Lake of the Isles, its solid, business-like style reflected the neighborhood's prevailing urbanity just as keenly as his father's mansion had characterized the bodacious generation of frontier speculators.

Today the massive red brick Horace Lowry mansion remains as urbane an address as it ever was. The four luxury condominiums that now inhabit the interior represent a careful blend of contemporary remodels and historic detail, treating the Lowry legacy well. The one-time boiler room continues that tradition into the 21st century. -E.R.

LEFT Fir panels travel on rolling hoist trolleys across an I-beam to hide the 70-inch television. OPPOSITE The low-slung furniture and artwork add human scale to the room's high ceilings and hard edges.

Among the many subtleties at work and play here, perhaps the craftiest is the relationship between what is featured and what is hidden. The fir panels can roll shut on hoist trolleys across an I-beam, hiding the 70-inch television. A hydronic heating system was installed below a new concrete floor. In this former boiler room once filled with ducts and pipes, the new utilities are all but invisible.

Fully apparent, however, is the design's graceful balance-hard textures and warm colors, high ceilings and low-slung furniture and artwork, slick technology and coziness-that feels complete while retaining its turn-of-the-Iast-eentury utilitarian essence.•

Local writer Evan Reminick works in public affairs, market-ing, and journalism. His articles on design have appeared in magazines nationwide.

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