The Foundation
This project began with a strong point of view: Lake Minnetonka.
The homeowner loved ocean-color hues and glamorous style, but the home needed more than beautiful rooms. It needed cohesion. It needed to feel intentional across very different spaces, each with its own role, rhythm, and audience. That became the central design question:
How do you create one complete story while allowing each room to speak in its own voice?
The answer was not repetition. It was control. A shared visual language, interpreted with nuance—more expressive where the moment called for it, more restrained where calm and permanence mattered most.
Architectural Language
The setting on Lake Minnetonka gives this home its emotional center. The home does not announce a theme. It carries a mood. Instead of approaching the project with literal references, the design draws on a more ethereal experience of being near water: softness of textures, reflections of light, motion of the wind and waves, an airy atmosphere. Curved forms, luminous surfaces, deep blues, layered lighting, and grounding metallic accents applied expertly created these interiors that feel fluid and composed at once.
Including glamour added to the delight where more restraint elsewhere ensured lasting beauty and style. The design intentionally embraced the movement between the expressions of playful and pronounced, to quieter, more refined and anchored giving the home its rhythm.
Craft & Composition
As in all of Julian Design’s work, this one is highly detailed.
The kitchen became a vivid expression of the project’s more adventurous side. It’s bold, polished, and unapologetically tailored. Custom curved cabinetry, sparkling blue paint finishes, LED-lit countertops, and lighted mirroring soffits give the space new presence and personality.
In the kitchen, lighting became the move that shifted the energy of the room. Along with light-changing ceilings and countertops, this room has an electrifying mood. Its an experience guests will never forget.
The same design language is carried throughout the house with a disciplined hand. Brass accents appear throughout, including within the flooring, bringing warmth and structure to the softer palette and grounding the home’s more ethereal notes.
The opulent owner’s suite retreat was inspired by the feeling of a luxury yacht. Elsewhere, the bunk room introduces another expression entirely: warm, playful, and designed around family life.
Throughout the home, every move serves the whole. Expressive, but never excessive. Luxurious, but always livable.
The Experience
This is a home that understands atmosphere.
The spaces were designed not simply to impress, but to create a feeling—of welcome, of ease, of quiet indulgence. The glamour is real, but it is controlled. The palette is expressive, but never loud. The home knows when to shimmer and when to exhale.
The home embraces romance and decadence, while inviting retreat to the lake-life. It delights and elevates, yet slows the eye and calms the soul. It lets the views, scents, and sounds of the lake do their part in the complete experience. The interior design embraces a lifestyle of those who live there. Similar to the family that inhabits the home, no single room carries the entire story. The story is experienced in how they relate to one another.
“It was a great lesson in reimagining the space and getting creative with the existing elements.”
Someone
Results
The continued success of this project lies in its cohesion. Beginning in 2005 and continuing through today, it truly represents how Julian embraces design as process–not an event. This client wasn’t dictated by a singular style, they value the art of living, family and friends, luxury and ease, simplicity and grandeur. The anticipation lies around the corner and the surprise of its discovery. This home is a pinnacle example of our beliefs and how we partner with our clients focusing on who they are and how they live.
This luxury lake home is deeply connected to its setting. A home inspired by water and elevated by detail. Ocean evoking hues, reflective finishes, brass detailing, and carefully layered illumination create the flexible rhythm that connects without sameness. Over time, this visual rhythm became the quiet heartbeat that unites rooms and revisions–ensuring the completeness of the residence.
It is beautiful for those who live there and memorable for every guest who enters. Designed to feel just as right in ten or twenty years as it does today.
The Harmony of Rooms
Each room contributes to a larger, unified narrative—one defined by light, glamour, and life on the water.
