This 1920s Minneapolis Mansion Was 'Like a Lady Who Hadn’t Been Listened To' – Liz Gardner Let the House Tell Her What It Needed

When Liz Gardner first walked into the building that would become Maison Bodega, she wasn't looking at a blank canvas. Years of commercial use had left the 1920s Minneapolis residence buried beneath layers of carpet and linoleum, obscuring the original floors, windows, and proportions. When Liz's mother first toured the building, she looked around and said, ‘It's like a lady who hasn't been listened to.’ For Liz, Mom hit the nail on the head.

So listening became the starting point. Rather than asking what she could impose on the building, Liz, who runs creative studio Bodega Ltd. and is as multi-hyphenated as the building itself, began by uncovering what was already there, creating a home and creative studio where the architecture could work alongside the demands of modern life. Today, Maison Bodega combines everyday living, creative work and entertaining, with spaces that can shift from family life to dinners, exhibitions and photoshoots. The result is a house that feels more rediscovered than renovated – layered, lived-in and still evolving.

'Listening', in practice, meant resisting the urge to start over. Maison Bodega was designed in 1920 by architect Ernest Kennedy, and thankfully, much of its original character still remained beneath the layers. Under commercial carpet and drop ceilings, they found original floors, moldings, windows, barrel ceilings, and stone stairs, along with the proportions and light that had made the house special in the first place.

'What immediately drew me to the house wasn't simply its age, but how much of its original character had survived,' says Liz. 'Even the imprint of a fireplace that once stood in the ballroom, or a window that had later been cut into a doorway, to which we eventually added a Juliet balcony, felt like evidence of a life already lived rather than flaws to erase.'

As layers were removed, traces of the building's different lives began to emerge and were allowed to remain. 'Buildings accumulate lives, and I think those layers are part of what gives them character,' says Liz. Inspired by museums in Milan, she wanted Maison Bodega to feel like a house that could continue accumulating history, rather than one frozen in an imagined version of 1920.

'Where we did intervene, we tried to be equally honest about the present,' she explains. 'The unlacquered brass kitchen, terrazzo mixed specifically for the house, and contemporary lighting that aren't pretending to be original. For me, preservation and contemporary design aren't opposites; the house can hold both,' Liz continues. 'The goal was never for the new to disappear into the old, but for each layer to make the others more visible.'

If the history of the space provided the framework, the interiors were allowed to evolve much more instinctively. Liz doesn't describe the house as having a particular style; instead, she follows whatever catches her curiosity. 'That curiosity can become a fascination with an artist, a material, a period of decorative arts, something discovered while traveling, or a strange object whose story I can’t stop thinking about. Eventually those interests find their way into the house,' she explains. Her aim isn't for everything to match, but for the individual pieces to have a conversation with one another. 'I’m drawn to objects with presence and provenance, but also to a certain tension between things,' she continues.

Color, too, was discovered within the bones of the building. During the process of stripping back the house and 'listening', Liz found a rosy pink in the plaster of the lower-level bathroom, seafoam milk paint beneath the drop ceilings, celery yellow around the concrete stair hanger, and tawny brown in the ballroom. Rather than removing those traces of the past, she used them to inform the colors and textiles introduced later. 'Any additional paint colors were sourced to match what already existed, so the architecture and its materials could remain the constant rather than becoming a backdrop for an entirely new palette,' she notes.

Leading up the stone staircase from the street-level bar, the house becomes more private, opening up to Liz's apartment. The reconfigured living area (the space used to be two bedrooms and a bathroom) is framed by built-in bookshelves and pale pink French doors.

'I eventually found an antique Juliet balcony that happened to be the perfect dimensions for the opening,' Liz recalls. 'It has become one of my favorite places to experience the seasons and look over the garden – and, perhaps more importantly, a perch where our dogs can spend hours basking in the sun.' In fact, Liz's dog, a Siberian husky named Agnes, was so inspirational to the Maison that they painted the exterior moldings a soft blush pink matched to the color of Agnes's tongue.

The kitchen sits directly alongside the ballroom, with the two spaces deliberately treated almost as one. Liz worked with Fisher & Paykel on the appliances, embracing their idea of a 'social kitchen' as a place where cooking, gathering and entertaining happen together. 'There is little desire in contemporary life to hide the kitchen, and because we entertain so often, I wanted ours to function almost like a restaurant line while still feeling domestic,' she explains.

The island is sized for a chef to plate dinner for 30, while refrigeration drawers and integrated dishwashers allow food to be prepared and served without disrupting the room. Visually, the space is a beautiful meeting of contemporary intervention and the house's original character. Unlacquered brass cabinetry is paired with Calacatta marble veined in pink and bronze, while vintage shell-back stools and vintage pendants add a romantic note.

Through an arched doorway off the kitchen, the larder is a quieter, more functional space, but it has one wonderfully oversized focal point: a 1920s Italian stone sink, for which Liz designed a brass base. 'The sink is so substantial that the walls were essentially built around it,' she recalls. Here, the open timber shelving, ceramics, baskets and linens are all set against the house's weathered plaster and the custom terrazzo floors. It feels less like a pristine pantry and more like a working room that has accumulated its contents over time – which feels exactly right for a house that is 'perfectly humming'.

One of the two bedrooms in Liz's private apartment remains almost entirely original, with its plaster walls and refinished yellow-maple floors preserving the character of the space. Here, twin beds are dressed with custom striped bedding and framed by floral canopies, bringing a more decorative, playful note to the otherwise restrained scheme. The original window remains the room's focal point, drawing in dappled light and views of the surrounding trees.

The guest bedroom takes a quieter approach to pattern, with a low-key palette of faded blush, cream and soft green layered across the bed and an antique floral screen. The room's original plaster has been left beautifully imperfect, with marks left by the people who built the house more than a century ago preserved. 'They’re quiet and incredibly easy to walk past, but I love knowing they’re there,' says Liz.

The bathroom is one of the clearest examples of how lightly Liz intervened upstairs. 'The original bathroom contains one of my favorite surviving details in the house: a wet-set tile shower enclosure and tiled walls,' she notes. While they were able to preserve the original wall tiles, Liz introduced hand-clipped honed tiles to the floor and sourced period sinks, toilets, and faucets in the hope that 'everything would feel as though it had always been there.'

The collected objects throughout Maison Bodega aren't there simply to fill shelves or complete a decorating scheme. Liz approaches the house 'as a collector before I approach it as a decorator,' buying pieces because she is curious about their maker, material or provenance, rather than because she has a particular space to fill. That gives the interiors a sense of discovery and also means the house is never quite finished.

Objects circulate between rooms, photographs and creative projects, while new combinations emerge as her work evolves. 'That circulation keeps the house alive,' she says. And perhaps the best rule for knowing what belongs is a wonderfully instinctive one: 'Does it make your heart go pitter patter? Then it should probably live with you.'

For all the emphasis on uncovering what was already there, there was a substantial amount of intervention: new archways were built to match the originals, plaster was repaired and extended, moldings and trims recreated, windows restored and reglazed, and new terrazzo, kitchen, and larder spaces introduced.

'We borrowed from the house’s existing material and architectural vocabulary so that, wherever possible, you aren’t immediately aware of where the original ends and our work begins. Editing became as important as adding, but what we added was intended to feel as though it could have always belonged here,' Liz notes. 'The additions we made were largely about the rituals of daily life: a place for morning coffee in the brass-clad kitchen; a balcony where our Siberian huskies can look out over the garden; a stone sink from Italy that functions as a kitchen counter in daily life, but is shallow enough to fill with ice for oysters and bottles of wine when the house is full of people. The same spaces simply shift in purpose as the day does,' she adds.

'I want the rooms to feel accumulated through experience rather than composed all at once,' she continues. That sense of gradual collecting is everywhere: in the sympathetic decoration, the traces left by previous occupants, and the rustic surfaces that have been deliberately allowed to remain. 'I like that you can read some of that history rather than having every surface perfected.'

But perhaps its transformation was made most tangible on the night of its first dinner, when the kitchen was unfinished, the stove had only just been installed, and an oval table stood in for the island. Liz recalls how she slipped away to the larder to call her parents – 'I think this is what the house sounds like when it’s happy.' After everything the house had been through, perhaps that was the clearest answer to all the listening.

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