Judy Cyr watched a 1,000-pound slab of granite get hoisted with pulleys into her new screened-in porch. That was followed by two pieces weighing 400 pounds each and a final piece weighing in at 800 pounds. Together these huge stones form the hearth, sides and top of one spectacular fireplace. And that’s before counting the 4,000 additional stones shipped in from five continents, intricately arranged to complete a swirling, 16-foot-tall magical work of art.
Cyr bought her Minnetonka home in 2003. The original plans included a screened porch that was never built. “When we decided to build the porch,” Cyr says, “I asked builder Russ Bolten to recommend a fireplace mason.”
Bolten says, “Judy showed me a picture of a smaller-scale fireplace she’d clipped from a magazine, which had stones arranged in a whirled pattern. I told her I knew a mason named Dan Peterson of Peterson Masonry Design in Maple Plain and showed her a picture of a fireplace he’d done in Excelsior with lighting and a water feature. She saw that and knew Dan was the right guy.”
“I thought we might use imitation stones,” Cyr says, “but Dan had bigger ideas. Better ideas. I let him be creative, and the porch project turned into something completely different than I imagined—something amazing.”
Peterson has been a mason since the mid-1990s and started Peterson Masonry Design in 2002. He creates mostly custom work with artisan stone, stained glass, fossils and geodes. “I tend to think creatively about things,” Peterson says. “I’m inspired by nature, and my favorite medium is stone because it’s functional. You can build a fireplace or a whole house from stone. It’s an art form that is more than a two-dimensional expression.”
For Cyr’s project, Peterson began with a general concept based on her picture. He obtained the hand-quarried granite hearthstones from a quarry in Canada. The remaining stones were obtained through worldwide sources. “I began from the bottom,” says Peterson. “Some areas were pre-planned; others I created along the way. My goal was to make each area interesting but keep the entire structure coherent. I tried to give it a sense of motion, like it’s alive. I imagine generations being inspired by this work.”
Those distinctive points of interest include embedded crystals and candle nooks with inlaid amethyst geodes. During construction, Peterson also laid thousands of fiber-optic strands into the stone. The strands track back to an LED light box that can change and control the color, intensity and pattern of the lights. Each strand isn’t much thicker than a human hair, which means they can’t be seen unless they’re turned on—but flip the switch and they can twinkle like stars. They can even be connected to a sound system and pulse to the rhythm of music.
A mantel made from an old tree from West Virginia is supported by iron pieces twisted into whimsical branch-like shapes. Additional granite pieces provide bench seating along the windows. The outdoor aesthetic is maintained throughout the porch with a barn wood-plank floor from a Lonsdale lumber supplier, a beadboard ceiling and wainscoting along the walls.
An architect once asked Peterson if he ever builds anything simply straightforward. Peterson says, “If I stop dreaming of new and creative things to do in masonry, it will be time to do something else.”
