Justin Armintrout’s dream house is small. At only 815 square feet, some might call it tiny. But Armintrout has mastered the art of making small spaces seem expansive.
“I’d always admired the house,” he said of the home at the corner of Lolo Street and Greenough Drive. “I always thought it had great potential.”
From the outside, the house is classic cottage, with potted plants, dark green shutters and an awning over the stoop. Within is a European styled interior, clean lines and clear views from one room to the next.
Through manipulating layout and décor, the cottage feels airy and open. Part of the trick is in color choice, and utilizing lines of sight.
“If you can look across a room diagonally, it makes the space appear much larger,” Armintrout explained.
Armintrout’s palate is earthy and bright: lambswool walls make a perfect canvas for bold metal antiques. The living room’s mustard brightens an otherwise small space, and an accent wall in the entry is bright Georgia brick, allowing the color to warm and flow from the focal point of the house back through the rooms. The floor is narrow planed oak, original to the house, darkly grained with time.
Armintrout moved to Missoula in 1994, to attend the University of Montana. He worked his way through school by gardening for Gilbert Millikan at his Rattlesnake estate. It was at that time he noticed this house. Intrigued by a circular driveway and mature but overgrown yard, he admired the house from afar.
Then a couple of years ago, Armintrout noticed the house was for sale.
“I jumped at the chance to buy it,” he said.
Armed with knowledge gleaned from Sarah Susanka’s book, “The Not So Big House,” Armintrout went to work modernizing the inside of house, while restoring quaint cottage accents to the outside.
Armintrout added shutters and an awning, resurfaced the driveway and landscaped the front yard to emphasize the sea-side feel of the house’s exterior.
Inside, the house was compartmentalized with small, cramped rooms. Armintrout took out walls to open the space, allowing light to flow.
“For me, a home is spiritual,” he explained. “It’s where I get my energy.”
“The idea of Susanka’s book,” he went on, “is to condense the square footage down to 1,200 square feet of fabulousness.”
“It’s like a sailboat,” he continued, “every square foot is utilized and has a purpose.”
To gather additional design ideas, Armintrout “subscribed to every magazine possible.” Still, he had an edge.
“I’ve always been interested in design, and most of my friends are designers,” he admitted. Plus, he emphasized, “I just really worked with what was here. The bones were here.”
Armintrout gives all the credit for his sleek, open kitchen to his partner, Peter Kulka.
“He’s Swiss,” Armintrout says. The space is small, and when they couldn’t find suitable components in Missoula, they went online. “Ikea has a website where you can build and design your own kitchen,” Armintrout said. And all Ikea’s pieces are “European sized,” with a width of 24 inches.
The duo went to Seattle and brought back 156 pieces in a U-haul, including a panel-fronted fridge.
“It’s much smaller than a conventional fridge,” Armintrout explained. Their stove is narrow as well, perfectly suited to the house’s space. Keeping everything in proportion is another key to making the small space look large.
Armintrout’s decorating is particular to him. “I’m big into family heirlooms,” he said.
His grandfather’s WW II flight jacket hangs on his office wall, along with family photos and a dollar bill that bears the name of every man his grandfather, a flight instructor in the war, taught to fly who did not make it through the conflict. “He carried that in his wallet til the day he died,” Armintrout said.
One kitchen wall sports miner’s helmets from Butte - “You can still smell the soot on them” A row of convex hubcaps lines another. The metal accents lend a modern flare.
A telephone nook is pure vintage, with a black rotary phone and a framed portrait of his mother as a young woman.
Armintrout’s philosophy on design is holistic.
“I look at houses as taking care of someone when they live there,” he said.
In return, Armintrout is caring for his house. He has revitalized the landscaping, applying the skills he learned at Millikan’s to his own gardens. “Gilbert taught me everything I know about gardening,” Armintrout said.
“I grew up in the country,” Armintrout recalled. “The backyard sold me. It’s almost three quarters of an acre.” His large lot, small house configuration replicates that feeling, while living in a vibrant urban setting. “I love it. It’s my therapy.”
With such a large yard, he gets to practice that therapy a lot.
The biggest battle is with the plentiful urban deer.
“I wanted a yard where I didn’t have to put a cage around any of my plants,”
Armintrout said. So the front is open to deer, but planted with deer-resistant species such as Echinacea and bee balm, sedum, Shasta daisies and agapanthus.
A line of mature trees shelters the house from the busy intersection. “The trees are really what anchor the place,” Armintrout said. Timbers that hem in the front yard’s junipers were reclaimed from the old Bonner Bridge. Other beds are rimmed with large rocks, gathered from the property. “One of the things I love about the Rattlesnake is the rocks,” Armintrout said. “Of course I don’t love them when I’m gardening, but every time I find one I add it to my rock walls.”
The backyard is surrounded by a six foot privacy fence, creating a personal park. “We kept the backyard for ourselves,” he said.
Armintrout mentioned “I do a lot of entertaining and a flat backyard with grass is marvelous for entertaining.” To soundproof the yard, Armintrout planted a double hedge – arbor vitae within the fence and cotoneaster on the street side. “Arborvitae is deer lettuce,” he said. A hammock out back is “a great place to take a nap,” he added.
The backyard also hosts a smaller guest cottage.
Built in 1994 by Terry Miner of Rockin’ M Designs, the 640 foot studio was being used as a rental when Armintrout purchased the home. He has since redone it into a guest house for his frequent visitors. The exterior’s white paint, dark green shutters and awning match that of the main house. Inside, the house is modern and crisp.
“We created this separate pathway to access the cottage from Lolo Street,” Armintrout says of the work he and Kulka did. “We wanted to give our guests some privacy.” They lined a gravel path with aspens, shrubs and containerized bamboo, creating a pastoral setting for the guest house. “It’s perfect,” said Armintrout.
“My mother comes and stays here.”
Armintrout has a penchant for antiques. In front of his house are iron urns, on the walls are family heirlooms, but the guest cottage boasts his true talent for décor.
Artifacts in the cottage include a stack of old, bound copies of 1920’s through 1940’s Billings Gazettes that Armintrout found in an antique store in Palm Springs, California.
“They’re stamped with the Montana Historical Society,” he said. “I tried to give them back, but they didn’t want them.” Apparently, the volumes were tossed after being put on microfiche. No one knew how they’d gotten to Palm Springs. “I brought them back here. I felt they belonged in Montana.”
The guest house has a spare, gallery feel. “I wanted to go with a clean look, so I whitewashed everything and painted the woodwork accents in black,” he described.
A loft above the living room sports a ’62 Peugeot moped Armintrout found while hostelling in Europe.
“It still works,” Armintrout said, though he mused “I don’t know if it would actually make it up Greenough Drive. In the center of the room hangs a deep green chandelier, made from the spotlight of a cargo ship. “It has a bit of an industrial feel to it.”
On the loft is the hood of an old car, weathered the same pink as the true linoleum floor.
Back in the main house, the 400 foot basement is “our winter project,” Armintrout said. It houses a laundry room and two legal bedrooms that still have walls decaled by the room’s former occupants. The couple intends to refinish the walls in bamboo and wainscoting, and use the space for guests.
In their own chamber, bedside lamps were once used by seamstresses in England, and were found during the same trip Armintrout found the Peugeot. “Other people collect keepsakes from their travels,” Armintrout said. “I collect antiques.”
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