Author: Christy DeSmith

Every holiday season since 1963, a baroque, fairy-tale-inspired display has been assembled on the eighth floor of the original Dayton’s store in downtown Minneapolis, a tradition that began as the Dayton family’s annual “gift to the community.” But earlier this year, when Federated Department Stores became the new parent company of Marshall Field’s and vowed…

"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…

Not long after the new Design Collective boutique opened in Uptown, its display window featured a two-tiered, amphibious-looking skirt whose ruffles, shaped with wires, were so impressive they stopped a passerby in her tracks. “It makes me think of a nudibranch,” explained Barrett Johanneson, months later, as he fished the skirt out of the trunk…

Libby Larsen has an athleticism and youthfulness that’s unusual for her fifty-four years. Her tiny, five-foot frame is lithe and wiry like a marathon runner’s. And she talks as fast as it looks like she can run. From the moment she walked into the D’Amico & Sons café near her South Minneapolis home, she was…

Over the summer, as a new orchestra season neared, Minnesota Orchestra Artistic Director Osmo Vänskä started cropping up with more frequency and in interesting places. He fell out of the Sunday New York Times, for example. His smiling face was spotted on a friend’s bookshelf, atop a collectors’ edition bobble-arm, and, in one colorful portrait…

When it’s snowing and everything is white, it looks like an Alaskan weather station,” said Chris Lange of his office building on Garfield Avenue South in Minneapolis. Even in balmier weather, the headquarters of Mono, the two-year-old advertising agency co-founded by Lange, is striking enough that people will stop in “at least once a week”…