Frank Lloyd Wright student designed, lived in Clear Lake home listed at $650K

Thom Cotton brought his ex-wife with him in 2020 to look at a house he was considering buying near St. Cloud.

“We walked in the door, she walked around for five minutes and said, ‘You’re buying this house,‘” Cotton said, vouching for her good taste.

Tom Olson, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright’s, designed the Clear Lake home starting in 1978. He also lived in it with his partner, artist Merle Sykora, for more than 40 years until selling it to Cotton.

Now, Cotton is moving to be near family in Michigan and has put the three-bedroom, 2,750-square-foot house on the market for $650,000.

“I really didn’t want to leave her — it’s a ‘she,’ by the way,“ Cotton said of the house.

Just as Wright did with many of the buildings he designed — including Fallingwater in Pennsylvania and Taliesen, his home and school, in Spring Green, Wis. — Olson gave the house a name: Ashera, after ancient Near Eastern goddess Asherah.

That’s not the only way Olson’s work reflects his teacher’s influence. The house is low-slung and horizontal, looking from the front like an unassuming rambler. But its perch above the Mississippi River allows the back of the home’s walls of windows to offer dramatic views of the water, trees and wildlife.

Ashera is grandfathered in, but zoning now requires homes to have farther setbacks from the river, Cotton said.

“From the cantilevered deck you’re looking right down at the river,” he said.

The home “is pretty much an homage to Frank Lloyd Wright,” said Peter Barile, who sits on the board of Docomomo US/MN.

The state chapter of the nonprofit is dedicated to documenting and conserving the work of the Modernist Movement, which includes Wright’s and many of his students’ work.

Modernist architecture emphasizes understated simplicity, open floor plans that connect the indoors to the outdoors, large horizontal windows, rectangular shapes and the belief that form follows function.

In February, Barile set up a tour of the house for about 70 Docomomo members.

"Everywhere you look, it’s just walls of glass overlooking the river,“ Barile said, adding as the light changes throughout the day, ”you get different moods. That room isn’t going to look the same as it did at 9 a.m. by 4 p.m.“

The house also reflects Wright’s preference for materials like brick and natural wood, in this case, cedar.

“The presentation of materials is natural: Wood is wood, it’s not painted. Concrete is concrete,” said Rob Barros of St. Paul, a filmmaker who made a documentary about John Howe, another of Wright’s students who also taught Olson.

Though not large, the house feels comfortable and spacious, he said. Its flow, a design term describing the ease of moving around inside a house, “is really pretty neat.”

Deanna Seuss, who lives in a Lakeville house Howe built, toured Ashera and left impressed.

“There’s an eagle’s nest off to the side,“ she said she spied from the bank of windows. ”It’s a smaller house, but it doesn’t feel like a smaller house.”

Of the house’s two levels, one holds the main living space, a bedroom, main bathroom, kitchen, small office and large fireplace. Below there is another bedroom, bathroom, family room and laundry.

The garage has doors on either side so a car could drive in the front and out the back. The garage separates the main house from another space with a bedroom, bathroom and small kitchen intended for Sykora’s mother, but she died before she could use it.

Cotton rented that part out as a “very successful” Airbnb, he said. Some of the guests requested tours of the main house, and he would sometimes oblige.

Sculptures of Sykora’s are scattered about the two-acre lot, Cotton said, including a stone and gravel labyrinth designed for quite contemplation he has used often. The yard has “well over 1,000 hostas of different varieties,“ per Cotton, making the whole property ”just this brilliant green.”

Clear Lake is a city of about 700 people roughly an hour drive northwest of the Twin Cities but just 15 minutes from St. Cloud. It’s also about five miles to Clear Lake’s downtown, and about the same distance to nearby Clearwater, which has about 2,000 residents.

Clear Lake “has some decent restaurants,” Cotton said, although he shopped more in Clearwater, with its “nice grocery store.”

Proximity to nature is another of Ashera’s most important features, Barros said. When he toured the house recently, he saw red-tailed hawks, eagles, smaller birds and deer up close.

”They were clearly used to being in that yard" he said, “and they were not at all phased.”

Cotton has seen ducks, geese, trumpeter swans, pelicans, turkeys, woodpeckers and eagles, adding he’s “even seen an otter out there.”

The stretch of river near the home also “has some of the best smallmouth bass fishing in the state,” according to Cotton.

All the home’s features combine to make Ashera an oasis.

“You can’t go to Ashera and not relax,” Cotton said. “Everything just melts away.”

Jim Slater of Slater Realty Group, a part of Coldwell Banker (612-590-1802, jim@slaterrealtygroup.com) has the $650,000 listing.