The Handmade Tale

"I’ve always found you get more spiritual energy if you have things made by two hands—especially your own two hands,” said Kimber Fiebiger. If so, then her home is coursing with such energy: The entire place was built with her hands, and those of friends. It sits atop Fiebiger’s Joan of Art gallery, which, with its bronze Humpty Dumpty sculptures perched on stone-wall pedestals along Franklin Avenue in the Seward neighborhood, is a colorful Minneapolis landmark. When she purchased the hundred-year-old building, in 2000, it was a wreck. The entire second floor was but a shanty attic, so Fiebiger, along with her kids and friends, “tore it off and built a house. We had about fourteen people in the middle of winter—friends, my kids—and we just framed it up. It was like an old-fashioned barn-raising.”

Windows were the touchstone for Fiebiger’s architectural vision. She bought a handful of one-of-a-kind pieces from the Marvin Windows Outlet in Warroad, Minnesota, and “we just designed the building around the windows,” she said. Her whimsy is on view along the living room’s east wall, where a picture window and three boxy, smaller panes are lined up to keep the room flooded with sunlight. At night, they cast geometric shapes of moonlight all over. “People do drugs to get this effect,” she said with a chuckle.

For home furnishings, Fiebiger headed to dumpsters and alleyways around the city, adopting others’ cast-offs; her kitchen’s retro cupboards were salvaged from the Reuse Center. But Fiebiger mainly creates fixtures and housewares, such as her artsy dishware, in a suite of basement studios equipped for welding, woodworking, potting, and making stained glass (some of which she sells in the gallery). She often makes use of remnant materials from art and building projects; for example, she nailed down—by hand, of course—leftover spalted maple and Brazilian cherrywood strips for flooring. For her son Gabriel—or rather, his collection of Lord of the Rings action figures—she improvised a landscape out of hardened drizzles of insulation foam. The delighted twelve-year-old made it the centerpiece of his bedroom.

Even in a home where every square inch has been lavished with handcrafted care, Fiebiger’s expansive bathroom is extraordinary. Outfitted with both a hot tub and an upright shower, it’s plastered with thousands of black and white tile shards. Curlicues and fiddleheads coil around the floors and walls of what she calls her “homage to insomnia.” The catalyst, apparently, was the end of a long-term relationship. “I was pretty wiped out, so I broke a lot of tile and made an art piece out of it,” she said. Her troubles turned out to be transformative: “This is my favorite thing I’ve ever made.”—Christy DeSmith