August 28
Older Twin Cities homes have a lot going for them – solid bones, mature trees out front, a neighborhood that’s already established. What they usually don’t have is a primary suite that feels like anything special. Homes built during the 60s, 70s, and 80s were designed around a completely different idea of what a bedroom needed to do, and it shows the moment you walk in.
Most primary bedrooms from that era are just bedrooms. No attached bath, a single small closet, maybe a shared hallway bathroom two doors down that the whole family fights over in the morning. If you’ve been living with that setup for years, you already know exactly what’s missing. The good news is that a primary suite remodel is one of the more game-changing projects we take on, because the before and after is so stark.
Before jumping to finishes and fixtures, it helps to name the specific problem your current suite has. Is it just too small? Does it lack a private bathroom entirely? Is the closet an afterthought that can’t hold two people’s clothes? Older homes tend to have one of these issues dominating, and the fix looks different depending on which one you’re dealing with.
A story-and-a-half home might have a primary bedroom tucked under a sloped roofline, with knee walls eating up half the usable floor space and a ceiling too low to stand up straight near the windows. A rambler might have decent square footage but a bathroom that was clearly squeezed in as an afterthought, with a tub-shower combo from 1978 and a single vanity built for one person. Knowing which problem you’re solving keeps the whole project focused instead of turning into a wish list with no direction.
Before anyone talks about pushing walls out, it’s worth asking whether the square footage you need already exists somewhere in the house, just poorly assigned. A hallway linen closet, an adjacent bedroom nobody uses anymore, an oversized closet that was generous by 1975 standards yet wastes space by today’s standards; these are all common sources of extra square footage that don’t require touching the exterior of the house.
We’ve reworked plenty of primary suites by borrowing from a neighboring room rather than expanding the footprint. It’s a full main level remodel or upper-level equivalent when it touches several linked spaces at once, and it’s often the more efficient path to a bigger, better suite than an addition would be.
If there’s one area worth spending on, it’s the bathroom attached to (or added to) your primary suite. This is where “luxury” actually shows up day to day, not in a fancy headboard or a paint color, but in the experience of getting ready every morning and winding down every night.
A few things come up again and again in these projects. Freestanding soaking tubs paired with a separate walk-in shower, rather than the old tub-shower combo trying to do both jobs poorly. Heated floors, which matter more in Minnesota than almost anywhere else in the country once October hits. A double vanity with real counter space, since one of the most common complaints in older homes is two people trying to get ready at a single 30-inch sink. Better lighting around the vanity specifically, since most 1970s and 80s bathrooms were lit with a single fixture overhead that does nobody’s makeup or shaving any favors.
A frameless glass shower enclosure with a bench and a rain shower head tends to be the single upgrade that homeowners mention most after moving back in. It’s not the most expensive line item in most bids, but it changes the whole feel of the room. If your current bathroom still has the original tile from whenever the house was built, this is usually the moment to finally deal with it.
A gorgeous bathroom next to a wire-shelf reach-in closet feels unfinished. Older homes routinely shortchanged closet space, and a primary suite remodel is the natural time to fix it. Walk-in closets with custom shelving, built-in drawers, and actual hanging space for two people’s wardrobes have become close to standard in these projects, not an upgrade tacked on at the end.
Sometimes this means borrowing square footage from an adjacent room, as mentioned above. Other times it means reconfiguring an oddly shaped existing closet that was never laid out efficiently in the first place. Either way, it’s worth designing the closet with the same attention given to the bathroom, since the two spaces get used together every single day.
Aging homes come with structural quirks that a primary suite remodel has to work around. Low ceilings under a roofline, load-bearing walls in inconvenient spots, plumbing that needs to be relocated to make a new bathroom layout work, electrical that wasn’t built to power modern lighting and heated floors. None of these are dealbreakers, but they do need to be identified early.
This is exactly why we walk trade partners, electricians, plumbers, and sometimes a structural engineer, through the space during the design phase, before a build contract gets signed. Discovering that a wall is load-bearing after construction has started is expensive and slows everything down. Discovering it during design just requires adjusting the layout before anyone’s picked out tile.
The word “luxury” gets thrown around a lot in remodeling marketing, and it usually just means expensive materials. The primary suites that actually feel like a retreat share something else in common: they’re designed around how the homeowners actually use the space. A reading nook by a window. A private entrance to a deck or patio. A layout that separates the sleeping area from the bathroom and closet so the whole suite doesn’t feel like one big room.
None of that requires a mansion-sized addition. It requires a design phase that spends real time talking through how you actually live, not just what materials you want on the walls.
A primary suite remodel touches structure, plumbing, electrical, and finishes all at once, which makes the planning stage more important than almost any other project type. An initial consultation is where we walk through your current suite, talk through what’s not working, and figure out whether the fix is a reconfiguration, an expansion, or some combination of both.
If your primary suite has been on your mind for a while but the scope of the project has come across as overwhelming to figure out on your own, that’s exactly what this first conversation is for. Learn more about how HBRE approaches these projects, or get in touch and let’s talk about turning your bedroom back into the retreat it should be.
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