In January 2020, interior designer Stephanie Lalley felt in need of a design project—one that wasn’t in her own home. “I started looking—not very seriously—but then this little cabin came up, and I was like, ‘I need to go look at it,’” she says. “It was in total disarray!”
The 200-year-old, 480-square-foot log cabin near Backus (almost three hours north of the Twin Cities, close to Nisswa) was a project only a designer could instantly love. It needed TLC, but Lalley couldn’t wait to transform the dark, dingy house with no heat or water into a bright and airy oasis unlike anything else in the area. “What I liked about it was that it was small, and I thought it would be a little more manageable,” she says. “It was a beautiful property, but the cabin had been a little neglected.”
The land itself—a hillside slice on quiet Barrow Lake with a private dock and easy access to nearby Woman Lake—was just the kind of quiet oasis Lalley had in mind when she dreamed of remodeling a cabin. So she and her husband, Dan, spent the next year revamping it: from updating the floorplan (increasing the bathroom’s size by removing an awkward back bedroom, moving the fireplace from the kitchen to the living room, and building a breakfast nook where the fridge used to be to help the flow) to spraying insulation, building kitchen cabinets, painting coats of white throughout the space, and choosing livable, unfussy furniture and décor. But after they decided to sell the cabin in summer 2021, it fell into the right hands faster than they could have imagined.
Lalley hired Rob Grosse, a photographer at Spacecrafting, to shoot the cabin before they put it on the market. “I went up there, and they let me stay the weekend in it to photograph it,” Rob says. “I walked in and was completely floored. It took 10 minutes, and I said, ‘Steph, I’ll buy it.’ I hadn’t even talked to my wife yet.”
Rob purchased the cabin—furniture and all—to rent out as an Airbnb (search “Unforgettable charming one bedroom log cabin”), adding a few touches of his own along the way but mostly keeping it as Lalley designed it. “I never would have been able to put this together,” Rob says. “It was perfect already.”
Designer: Stephanie Lalley, Lucy Interior Design, IMS, 275 Market St. Ste. 311, Mpls., 612-339-2225, lucyinteriordesign.com
