🏡 Inside the briefly famous "1936 Insulite House"

Sometime in the late seventies, Jim Mulligan was biking home from an afternoon at Lake Nokomis to his rented duplex in Seward, taking a preferred route along 45th Avenue, when a heavy downpour started.

He took cover under a massive pine tree that no longer exists at 36th Street. As he waited out the rain, he found himself staring across the intersection at a boxy, mint-green house that looked nothing like the earth-toned bungalows that surrounded it.

Now that, he thought, is an interesting house.

A few years later, he and his wife Carol were spending yet another evening flipping through a physical booklet of MLS listings, weary from more than 70 fruitless visits to homes around south Minneapolis, when he spotted a thumbnail of the curious cubic house. Though it was well outside the young couple's price range, the year was 1982, mortgage interest rates were approaching 20 percent, and pricier homes were slow to move. They eventually worked out an unlikely deal that involved negotiating the price way down, bumping their final offer up, and arranging for a contract-for-deed agreement that didn't require a mortgage.

It was plainly obvious that their new home differed from its neighbors. But they didn't think much of it beyond that until, a few years after they moved in, a man knocked on the door and handed them a newspaper clipping. The man's father collected old home advertisements, and in the collection was a grainy drawing of their house with the headline, "Visit the 1936 Insulite Home." He thought they should have it.

With that in hand, the couple began to gradually learn about their home's 15 minutes of fame as a marketing tactic for a defunct building product and architectural style. Forty years later, I came across the same ad while in the newspaper archives. I also began tracing the story, and made a similar cold visit to the house to leave a note of inquiry on the door. They invited me over on a sunny afternoon this fall, and together we put together the rest of the story.