Listing in Rare Form Presents: La Rochette of 1923
La Rochette of 1923
3 🛌 2🛁 1 🚙 2,544 sqft🦶$8,740 tax ⚖️ Listed @ $625,000 🏦 5317 1st Ave S 🗺️ MLS# 7032604 🖥️
An attribute we envy most about this Tangletown home is its orientation in its plot: it sits wider than it does deep. Most South Minneapolis homes run the opposite. They sit long in their narrow lots, with more modest frontages. La Rochette greets you with confidence – a frontal embrace, rather than the usual tepid, side-armed hug – as it did us when we pulled up to its façade with the current sellers (then buyers) seven years ago.
La Rochette endured a number of unfortunate modifications to its interior in the 90s, including a raised tile entry that meant stubbing one’s toe daily on the way to retrieving the mail. That 3’×3’ tiled entry was flanked by a pony wall that concealed storage cubbies behind flimsy louvered doors. Atop the pony wall was a skinny sunken cavity, a canal presumably for housing plants or as a general catch-all for wallets, keys, and detritus.
Among other 90s renovation sins: a kitchen with several non-functional upper cabinets (corner triangles!), a giant over-the-range microwave that required cutting into the door casing to make fit, and a conspicuous absence of ventilation, setting one up for an eternal battle with cooking grease.
A year ago, we began working with the sellers as they prepared to take their next step in their classic home journey. In late October, the Improvement Co. drew up a scope of work for the project and shortly after Thanksgiving our craft trades commenced the 3-month restoration.
Our guiding principle here as elsewhere was simple. To “improve,” that is, to make better, is not necessarily to make new. Our selections are intended always to accentuate and dress the good bones of the house – never to fight the aspect, architectural intent, or integrity of the structure, especially not for the sake of momentary convenience. For the bones are what endure. And once broken they are difficult to mend.
At La Rochette, aside from undoing obvious past missteps, really the home just needed a more sympathetic treatment. A palette, for instance, that complemented its heritage birch hardwood floors, that emphasized its enfilade-like series of cased openings along the home’s north-south axis, that responded to the generous light that fills the interior no matter the season…
Here our scope comprised floors, ceilings, trim carpentry, a kitchen refresh, lighting, paper, paint, enamel, and radiators, with special attention paid to the kitchen, main bathroom, and ground floor common spaces – areas that work the hardest in this (and any) family home.
“All the fixtures that we selected have some color or opacity to their glass – opaline, amber, pink, et cetera – which makes for a gentler quality of light. The hand-painted detailing is especially pretty when illuminated: petite florals in the sun room, living room, and upper hallway; narrow stripes in the kitchen and dining room. I’m particularly fond of the sun room pendant with its octagonal, faceted panels of custard glass.”
In old homes we find that flooring almost universally benefits from subtraction not addition. Fewer types is preferable to many. We bade good riddance to La Rochette’s big-box tile that lined the kitchen and the entry, replacing those with birch hardwoods to blend with the rest of the ground floor.
Turning our gaze upward from floors to ceilings, our trades undertook the painstaking work of scraping and restoring the plaster throughout the main floor, and upstairs in the hallway, primary bedroom, and main bathroom. Popcorn has a way of making ceilings feel oppressive, even when they otherwise have loft to them. Having shed the distracting texture overhead, the house happily regained its feeling of interior height.
Radiators, previously hidden behind covers, received our signature dark bronze enameling; and the fireplace brick, painted blinding white at some point, was returned to a quieter coloration, allowing it to properly anchor the living room.
One of the best features of La Rochette is its distinctly open feel on the main floor, as each of its rooms was designed to reference the space adjacent, via cased openings. It called therefore for a paper and paint scheme that would agree with the existing hard finishes, such as the kitchen cabinetry and stone, and the fireplace hearth. We opted for earth tones – deep yellow ocher, fired clay, smoky taupes – and set those against soft creams, buff pinks, and pinpricks of lilac and cornflower blue.
The best outcome eventuates when one lets the house tell you what it needs: pointed interventions where appropriate and restraint where the home calls for it. Now thoroughly sorted for the next stewards, we are so pleased to present La Rochette to you all, another fabulous addition to the storied Doors of Tangletown.
“The lighting and exposing of the radiators in the home is absolutely incredible from before to after. The newly refreshed kitchen and millwork makes the house so much richer feeling, especially with the softer lighting. We will miss the expansively wide lot which is so rare in Tangletown. Our heated attached garage is so much more functional than in any other home we found.”
