Merriam Park Modern

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Life, love and African desert tortoises collide in a modern shoebox in St. Paul.

Ben and Rachel Awes shown here with their two sons, Abe and Sam, in front of their beloved modern shoebox style home.

Image credit: Sara Rubinstein

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By: Chris Clayton | November | From the print edition

The neighborhood didn’t want Ben and Rachel Awes at first. The thought of somebody building on its beloved empty lot made it sad, and this was a happy place, this shady block in St. Paul’s Merriam Park area. The land in question was a vegetable garden that its owners, the family to its east, viewed as a perk of having a double lot in the city. Surrounding residents saw it as an asset, a green gem to admire while walking the dogs. When Ben’s friend Scot learned the entire spread was up for sale, he smelled an opportunity.

Scot acquired the property in 1999, and over dinner with Ben and Rachel one night, he mentioned splitting it up and selling each lot separately. And wouldn’t you know it, the young couple—he an architect, she a psychologist—had outgrown their south Minneapolis bungalow and were looking for a plot on which to build their dream home. They made an offer on the open tract, only to learn that their potential future neighbors had pooled some money and done the same.

“That’s when I played the friend card,” says Ben, seated at his dining room table. “I told Scot, ‘You promised us!’” Friendship won in the end, but the challenges were just beginning for the new landowners. At roughly 39’ x 150’, the lot is unusually narrow. To maximize interior square footage without losing green space, Ben drew up a simple shoebox design sans dormers or bump-outs. But when he submitted blueprints to the city, he learned that his design was two feet under the minimum home width requirement of 22 feet. Ben solved this problem by adding a wraparound porch running the length of the west side of the home (the zoning code, in very tiny print, stated that covered porches are included in home width).

But the problems kept coming. When it was time to break ground, Ben and Rachel’s contractor skipped town, leaving them with the unenviable task of managing the subcontractors. “I had never done that before,” says Ben. “When you self-contract, you have no sway over any of the workers.” He learned this the hard way when, halfway through the job, his carpenters took a break to work for a different client. For five weeks.

“We had no roof at that time,” he recalls. “Before they left, the carpenters threw a huge blue tarp over the trusses.” Late one evening, Ben got a call from a soon-to-be neighbor telling him that a storm had blown the makeshift cover loose. “So I drive over and take my flashlight and shine it up and there’s my neighbor—who happens to be a pastor—up in my rafters by himself trying to reattach this 80-foot tarp. He looked like Moses up there trying to tame the wind.”

This Ten Commandments-like scene proved a turning point, a sign that the block was ready to embrace the family it had initially tried to keep out. In the fall of 1999, Ben and Rachel received a figurative bear hug when the neighbors got together and painted their newly completed home. “It was a wonderful welcome,” says Rachel, who just got home from work and joins us around the table. “There was a potluck and everything. We made it a party.”

It’s easy to see why these two received such a reception. Ben is chatty and gregarious, Rachel warm and thoughtful. And it doesn’t hurt that their home is amazing. At first glance, its exterior doesn’t differ much from the other four-squares on the street. A double take, however, reveals layers of nuance. “We wanted a house that was sensitive to the vernacular of the area, in terms of proportion and materiality,” says Ben. “But we also wanted something fresh and new.”

The resulting two-story dwelling looks like the hippest barn you’ve ever seen. Its galvanized steel roof is a modernizing touch, as is the side porch, which adds dimension and character to the otherwise flat design. Happy collisions of old and new continue indoors: On the main level, the yellow-pine ceiling and silver maple flooring soften harsh elements like the concrete kitchen countertop and the schedule-40 pipes that line the staircase like the bars of a jail cell, albeit a well-designed one in which you wouldn’t mind doing some time. A white locker cabinet from IKEA shares the living room with a 1910 cube chair, a modernist grandfather clock and other decorative treasures such as Rachel’s whimsical freehand drawings, hanging just down the wall from 1970s pop art.

The juxtapositions are just as numerous upstairs, if not a touch subtler. In the master suite, a shelving system with stone-shaped cutouts (a nod to Rachel’s love of agates) lives in strange but effective symbiosis with a pair of spun aluminum sinks in the adjoining bathroom. Of the two other bedrooms on the second floor, the one closest to the wood staircase will eventually have glass walls.

Tying it all together is a palpable sense of family. Ben and Rachel met years ago as U of M undergrads, and they clearly share a deep affection for one another, proof of which can be seen in two oversized jars in the back of the kitchen. They contain thousands of pieces of paper, each one baring a reader comment pulled from Rachel’s art blog. It was Ben’s idea, the softy. He wrote out each comment (more than 2,000 total), curled each piece of paper (with the help of his mother) and gave the jars to his wife to mark the first anniversary of her website.

Any discussion of the home’s familial feel must also include Sam, 13, and Abe, 15. Rachel agrees. Midway through our interview she stomps the floor three times to call them up from the basement, where a video-game den butts up against a room housing a family of African desert tortoises (“They’re really dumb but I like their pace of life,” says Ben of his reptilian roommates). Rachel wants her sons’ take on the house. Abe, blond-haired and energetic, is fond of his room, particularly its purple walls (poor kid’s a Vikings fan). “I like its whole vibe,” says the mellower Sam, sporting a truly epic afro.

We’re with Sam. If this house were a voice, it would have formidable range—from showy soprano (see the light fixture above the dining-room table that’s raised and lowered via pulley) to strong, unwavering bass (yellow-pine beams, concrete counters). In short, this place really sings.

5 Things we learned from the Awes house

1. Don’t self-contract. Subcontractors are flaky enough when an
actual foreman is running the show.

2. Hire a student. Ben and Rachel tapped a star pupil from MCTC’s furniture-building program to build their kitchen cabinets. It’s a cheaper way to get custom work.

3. Don’t have a landscaping budget? Be creative. Ben designed a pair of steel containers that he fills with dirt and sod every summer to make decorative grass planters or, as he calls them, “sod pods.”

4. Reuse. When a silver maple fell on Ben’s parents’ place after a storm, he rough-sawed it, dried it for a year then turned it into the flooring on the home’s first level.

5. Embrace imperfection. Blemishes can be beauty marks in the right context. One of the beams in the Awes compound has a big gash in it from carpenters using it as a cutting board during construction. Scrawled on the unfinished sheet-steel pantry doors is a note written in wax pencil by a local metal shop—a reminder to “bill to Ben.”

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