Before+After: Down Under

Wild turkeys sometimes show up to strut their stuff on the deck of John and Lynn Riggs' seven-year-old ranch-style house 30 miles west of Milwaukee. The property — three wooded acres on a small lake — is also home to deer and raccoons, the occasional fox, and a feisty colony of snapping turtles.

When the Riggs decided to expand their 2,400-square-foot home by remodeling their walk-out basement, they envisioned a warm and welcoming room where they could entertain and where their sons — Alex, now 12, and Ian, 9 — could bring their friends; separate bedrooms and a shared bath for the boys; and most of all, an indoor space that would reflect their home's outdoor setting. “We wanted to create a northwoods look,” Lynn says.

“Karl was the third or fourth contractor we talked with,” John says of Karl Holtermann. “The others didn't seem to get it, but Karl instantly knew what we wanted to do. We wanted something different, unique, warm. The key was finding someone who understood.”

What Holtermann, a project manager and designer with Bartelt Filo, a decade-old Milwaukee-based custom residential and commercial remodeler, understood in that first meeting was that the Riggs basically wanted to create a log cabin in their basement. The couple had emphasized the word primitive in describing the look they wanted, and the word resonated with Karl: He owns an 1850s farmhouse and collects authentic period furnishings for it.

Photo Credit: Erol Reyal

“The clients wanted something special, not your basic rec room, and I appreciated the challenge,” he recalls. Integrating all of a client's expressed needs and desires in an initial sketch is “like taking a puzzle and putting it together,” Holtermann says. “Computer drawings can be cold. When a drawing has an artist's hand to it, it creates something the client truly wants to see.”

With that in mind, he produced hand-drawn illustrations of a room with log walls, a stone fireplace, and furnishings that call to mind a rustic turn-of-the-20th-century lodge.

Holtermann presented the Riggs with the perspective drawings and plans that specified materials and finishes that had the rugged quality the Riggs were looking for: rough-hewn logs, field stones, knock-down drywall texture, mottled tiles. The clients liked what they saw, and the project was under way.

From the support beams to the furnace to the hot water heater, virtually every mechanical and structural element in the basement seemed to be positioned to prevent the Riggs from creating the uninterrupted space they had visualized. According to Holtermann, “there were so many structural changes, literally nothing stayed in the same place.”

The early days of the project were the most difficult for Lynn Riggs. “I thought, ‘It's the basement — how intrusive can it be?' But there were jackhammers, and it was noisy and dusty, and I had to take the dog with me every time I left the house so he wouldn't freak out.”

The Riggs' new rec room has two distinct spaces. Here, comfortable sofas surround a fireplace and a television and other electronics, built into custom cabinets. Once the Riggs' saw the stone that would make up the fireplace surround, they decided to extend it along the whole wall.

Photo Credit: Erol Reyal

Smart scheduling coordinated a week-long family vacation with the most disruptive phase of the remodeling. While the Riggs enjoyed a stay at a Chicago hotel, the Bartelt Filo crew worked to reconfigure the home's mechanicals: They rerouted plumbing and electrical components, relocated the hot water heater, moved the furnace 15 feet south of its original location, and created a maze of new ductwork. “The infrastructure's huge,” Holtermann explains. “There's 2,400 square feet upstairs; 2,400 on this floor; two heating and cooling zones, upstairs and down. We stacked the ductwork. I'd say 75% of the joist spaces are filled with mechanicals.”

When the family returned from Chicago, Holtermann says proudly, “everything was reconnected and working.”

The project called on the skills of Bartelt Filo's in-house production team, including lead carpenter Mark Meyer, rough-in and finish carpenters, electricians, and others — as well as employing a network of subcontractors for interior design, heating, plumbing, expansion of the septic system, and other services.

Getting the look they wanted was important to the Riggs, and they were willing to spend the time needed to be sure the materials Holtermann suggested were exactly right. They took a weekend to drive to Minocqua, a vacation town in northern Wisconsin (250 miles north of Milwaukee), to see a restaurant built with the “wavy logs” that Holtermann recommended they use, rather than logs that had been planed to be square. In the same area, they visited the sawmill that would supply the logs — cut 2 inches thick, not the full 4 inches a structural wall would require — and chose rough milled hemlock, a typical Wisconsin wood.

The new rec room features this wet bar.

Photo Credit: Erol Reyal

For the chinking between the logs, Holtermann speced Perma-Chink, a synthetic product with the look and feel of traditional mortar. Commonly used in present-day log home construction, it's a flexible, textured acrylic that allows for continued expansion and contraction of the logs.

Unhappy with the fireplace stones available at a local supplier — they were “too pink and glittery,” according to John — the Riggs trekked to other quarries, then drove back roads looking for an old farmhouse foundation that could serve as a model for the precise ratio of mortar to stone that would capture the vintage look they wanted.

When they found the just-right foundation — on an old house only a half-mile away from theirs— and showed it to Holtermann, they asked him to change the plans to construct the entire fireplace wall, rather than just the surround, of stone.

The signal of a shift in style from the upper to the lower level begins at the open stairway, where the drywall of the main level meets a half wall of logs. (Holtermann kept the stairs in their original location but redirected them to create an open area at their base.)

The staircase dog-legs to the right and ends in a transitional space — a sort of lower level foyer/vestibule — at the foot of the stairs that separates the public and private areas. The log wall on the left mimics an exterior cabin wall, with a pocket door and two small four-paned windows that look into the main room. The remaining walls retain the drywall of the upper level, but add a rougher knock-down texture.

The homeowners' two sons have their bedrooms in the basement, where they share a bathroom.

Photo Credit: Erol Reyal

Turn right, and you reach the private spaces of the boys' bedrooms and shared bath, and two doors that lead to the concealed storage space and mechanicals.

In the transition area, a 7-foot-high dropped ceiling accommodates some of the copious duct work.

The lowered ceiling has aesthetic as well as practical value, Holtermann explains, as the volume of space contracts from the open stairway to the intimate vestibule, then expands again as you step through the doorway into the main room. “Big to small to big creates more drama,” he says.

The lower level's main area has two distinct spaces. In one, a handsome pool table shares star billing with a wet bar set into a wall of cabinetry that hides a small refrigerator and a microwave.

In the other — the Riggs call it “the Library” — comfortable sofas face equally enticing focal points: a broad fieldstone fireplace and a flat-screen rear projection television flanked by bookshelves.

The arched alcove for the toilet in the basement bathroom echoes architectural details that are found on the main level of the house.

Photo Credit: Erol Reyal

The television is set into cabinetry that acts as a frame for the screen, concealing all of the television's components, as well as other electronics. Throughout the lower level, the custom cabinetry, built off-site by Cabinet Craft Cabinets, features precisely finished inset doors and drawers, barrel hinges, and vintage-look drawer pulls. Its quarter-sawn oak and simple profiles are reminiscent of Arts and Crafts furnishings.

The Riggs like the contrast of the finished cabinets with the rough logs and beams that surround them. Examples of the deliberate balance of the primitive and the sophisticated abound. There are no baseboards in the room: The logs go right down to the floor, as they would in an old-time log cabin.

But Holtermann also notes that the electrical outlets were all placed horizontally, rather than vertically, so as not to interrupt the line of the logs.

Photo Credit: Erol Reyal

Framing for the banks of floor-to-ceiling windows that face north and west was deliberately painted in a neutral color that disappears into the wall, blurring the line between indoors and out.

Holtermann built details into the project that delighted the Riggs. In the powder room, he set the toilet into an arched alcove that echoes the arched entranceways on the main level, a feature that guests inevitably comment on, John says. “So many contractors want you to tell them what to do. Karl had suggestions, ideas, choices for us.”

Vanities in the powder room and the boys' shared bath incorporate the same careful hand-work and finishes as the cabinetry in the main area. “They really do look like pieces of furniture,” John says. “We could have gone with something less expensive, but this was definitely worth the extra cost.”

Photo Credit: Erol Reyal

Holtermann points out one of the “little consistencies” that are key to the project's polished appearance: In both baths, cabinetry hardware, door hardware, and towel bars all share the same oil-rubbed bronze finish — a finish that's also used on the hardware in the main room.

With help from interior designer Faith Wolf, Lynn found bathroom light fixtures with distressed finishes and pine cone details that reinforce the project's woodsy motif. In the boys' rooms, similar themes carry through, with subdued natural paint colors and sturdy furnishings. Each 16-by-14-foot bedroom has a large walk-in closet.

Woodsy motifs flow throughout the remodeled basement, giving the whole floor the feel of an outdoorsy retreat. Note the pine cone details in these light fixtures.

Photo Credit: Erol Reyal

“We wondered how the boys would adjust to sleeping down here instead of upstairs near us,” Lynn says. “But as soon as it was finished, our younger son took a pillow and blanket and slept there the first night, before we even had their beds in.”

With remarkably few snags on the project, the construction phase was completed in the six months it was scheduled to take, and with few changes made along the way, the project stayed within its $260,000 estimate, a figure that covered everything from painting and staining to appliances and plumbing.

Holtermann praises the Riggs' enthusiastic involvement in choosing materials for the project, and their patience throughout the process. “They had a very realistic approach and a lot of faith in us,” he says.

The colors for the renovation were pulled from upstairs, so that the new space runs smoothly into the rest of the house while still feeling like somewhat of a departure.

Photo Credit: Erol Reyal

Lynn, in turn, credits Holtermann for the project's successful outcome. “He knows how to listen. He found ways to make the separate spaces private. He helped us find materials. We found out he would come here and check things out when we weren't even aware of it. It might have been his own basement for all the attention he gave it.” —Judith Knuth frequently writes about design and travel topics from her home in Milwaukee