Feature: Cozy-weird Urban Castle

A former blacksmith shop in downtown Minneapolis gives songman Jeff Arundel a stage for the madcap workings of his equally visual mind.

Singer-songwriter Jeff Arundel read 'The Lord of the Rings' at age 12. Some four decades later, he wrote the book on fantastical homes. Here he is in his living room, cooking a hot dog with a sword. We sort of want his life.

Image credit: Cameron Wittig

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Flames flicker and melting wax pools around each wick as Jeff Arundel, 53, waxes eloquent about making music and creating his “cozy-weird urban castle.” Never mind that it’s daytime; the candlelight indoors is for effect, its glow complementing the sunshine gilding the space via skylights. Rivulets of hot wax spill over candle edges and cascade down rusty steel wall sconces, adding the latest layers to pyramid splats long hardened on the slate floor. Architects and interior designers spec ambient lighting; Arundel strikes matches. Could well be the guy points a wand and commands, “Lumos!”

Arundel Castle proper exists southwest of London and, although he’s visited it, the local singer-songwriter and south Minneapolis native owns an aesthetic that has scant precedent, save for the Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings movie sets or anything touched by legendarily kooky film director Tim Burton.

Sure, Arundel’s production has that castle vibe going: The courtyard gate opens to exclusive entry, the grand staircase calls for musically themed descents and a balcony is officially designated for morning coffee. But the home is rugged, humored and, well, the view from said veranda, the Metrodome, is no sunrise. (No love lost on the Dome: He who caffeinates up high co-composed and recorded the baseball-at-Met-Center tribute song “Harmon Killebrew,” which was on the Cities 97 Sampler in 1996 and received revived play after Killebrew’s recent passing.) This is the spatial playground of one whose audio ingenuity filled his pockets with play money.

Arundel, who’s released six albums of melancholy folk and acoustic funk, including Bomb this past February, as well as produced artists for major labels, founded Lifescapes, known to Target customers as the endcap listening stations populated with CDs of the world, wellness and classical ilk. Target bought the concept in 2002, the same year Arundel purchased the onetime blacksmith shop that John Cowles, Jr., former CEO of Cowles Media Company, once the Star Tribune’s mother ship, and his wife, Sage, had renovated into philanthropic offices and a dance/yoga studio downstairs with living quarters upstairs. For all its industrial, modernistic, architectural renown, it was to Arundel as good as a white-wall invitation to his respectably wayward imagination.

“Before” photos show the wide-eyed new homeowner gesticulating excitedly to a stone-faced man whose head is hung low in notable contrast. “Jeff would say ‘Let’s just do X,’ and I’d think, ‘Oh my God, that’s a lot of work,’” says photo subject Paul Tierney, the metalworker, sculptor and Arundel visual enabler whose hands bring to earthly reality the skyward visions of his client-cum-friend’s right brain. To wit:

Arundel: Let’s use those metal grids over there as windowpanes.

Tierney: (laughing) By the time we do that, it would be easier to just build windows.

Arundel: Well, now you’re onto something. Do that.

Tierney: What?!? You mean make fully operational windows?

Arundel: Yeah. Start today.

Called to the art but not the affectation, Tierney left the Minneapolis College of Art and Design after one year back in the 1970s because, “Art is a society of eccentric people,” he says. “So many of the art students were being crazy because that’s what you’re supposed to be.”

Tierney isn’t crazy, at least not outwardly. He hangs his tools—many of which he handcrafted himself—in his backyard Bloomington shop in rows and sweeps the floor daily. When not pounding, welding, grinding, sawing, drilling, torching, acidifying or otherwise capriciously manipulating metal and wood, he can hear his AM 1280 The Patriot talk radio or his cursory, curiosity-fueled turns to MPR. He’s known in local design circles for making nice fireplace doors, the narrowness of his fame somewhat preposterous, given his abilities.

Arundel’s and Tierney’s brothers were buddies. Tierney’s first solo remodeling gig was for Arundel’s dad in 1981. Tierney contributed to the renovation of Jeff Arundel’s former Lake Harriet house. Translated: “At the point we’re at now,” says Arundel, “I sketch an idea and it might as well be a five-year-old’s.” But Tierney gets it—gets him.

And so the pair, sans architect or interior designer but accompanied by, in Arundel’s words, “a bunch of carnies and oddballs—the dirty dozen approach,” stripped the place and got it up to livable within eight months. They used lichen-crusted stone from the St. Croix River to, rock by hand-fitted rock, amass the living room’s Rumford fireplace. They splashed water-based acid on steel panels to create the living room’s rusted walls. (Frank Lloyd Wright had laborers pee in buckets, thank you very much, to achieve a potion that had the same effect, according to Tierney. Charming.) They made the rooftop patio accessible via functional sculpture: twisted iron banisters, metal netting and slab walnut steps, the stairwell’s arch promising, “To the stars.”

All told, it took seven years for Arundel’s creative fire to be contentedly snuffed; for him to just “be” in the starlight, the sunlight, the candlelight of his creation. But minds like his burn restless. Forever will there be songs to write and castles to build. Thus derives his musing, “The process yields the outcome, whatever it’s going to be for all its turns.”