Jun. 16—RED WING, Minn. — When designing their home near Red Wing, Margaret and Kevin Simanski often returned to the focus of the country, farm atmosphere.
They wanted to save the silos and arrange the outbuildings for better usability on the property. They created a tack room for their horses. With each piece, they cemented the former dairy farm’s legacy to the 12-acre property.
“In the tack room, we took all those boards from that old granary and did the walls,” Margaret Simanski said. “We showed it to them (the previous owners) and … they got tears in their eyes because they couldn’t believe that we saved the boards. And it just looked so cool to put them up in there.”
For their “first attempt at actually farming,” the Simanskis started growing corn and apples and raising chickens and pigs. They own 88 acres with about 50 tillable acres. Simanski said most of the acreage is in hay. She added the gravel road to their home, which borders Frontenac State Park between Red Wing and Lake City, only has traffic during “farming times.”
“It’s just been so rewarding,” Simanski said. “We raise all our own meat, our own beef, our own pigs, our own chickens and we have our own eggs. And we raise all our own corn and all our own hay.”
In between planting her raised garden beds, Simanski said they’ve always lived in the country during their 45 years of marriage, though the Red Wing property is their most acreage. They purchased the land in 1997 and designed their custom home after moving from Hastings in 2005. Kevin grew up in the country and Margaret lived her summers on a family farm.
For Goodhue County, the USDA’s Census of Agriculture reported 1,406 farms in 2022. The county has 377,581 acres in crop and pastureland.
“It’s a great place to have a hobby farm. You can have cattle there, horses there, sheep, any kind of livestock,” said LandProz Real Estate Realtor Jen Busch about the property at 28983 320th Avenue Way near Red Wing. She grew up on a dairy farm near Rushford. “The feedlot permit is still active on it if someone wanted to take it over.”
With acres to pasture animals and ride their horses, the Simanskis started their projects with upkeep on the farm, such as replacing the barn’s roof, adding a three-sided shed and moving the power lines from the middle of the property. They also have a shop with upstairs heating and cold storage downstairs.
Their personal branding transformed the property into a four-bedroom and five-bathroom custom home. With design plans based on a “super cool” home in Inver Grove Heights, they worked with local contractors for a year, from 2004 to 2005, to build the home. They were there every day during the process, as Simanski said.
“When it was built, no corners were cut, which is appreciable in this modern age where you get sub-quality material. And when a seller’s willing to spend the extra money for something nicer, it’s not often you see that. It’s a rare quality,” Busch said.
Their home includes unexpected features, such as an indoor swimming pool, sauna, bedrooms with balconies and some ceilings over 20 feet tall. Even the cement on the front porch and pool deck are stained to have a texture. The 5,650-square-foot home “could almost be a multi-family home,” Busch said.
“Everybody that worked on the house they were all local people and … they would enhance (the ideas) and it was just so much fun,” Simanski said of working with companies including Knowlton Construction and Quality Concrete and Construction of Cannon Falls. “This was our dream home, I mean it’s huge, and we just wanted everything to be unique.”
Two of the most distinctive features are the stone fireplaces. The wood fireplaces have “massive footings,” with the main level fireplace set two feet at a time, as Busch and Simanski said. The stone pieces are also incorporated in the kitchen “just for something different.”
“With that big of an open area, it just looks so cool. It looks like a lodge when you come in,” Simanski said of the fieldstone fireplace on the main level.
Their indoor pool is a hard to come by feature, and particularly uncommon on farm properties. Over the last two years in Minnesota, seven properties with an indoor pool on five to 20 acres sold, according to data from the NorthStar MLS. Simanski said the pool was the “greatest thing” for their grandchildren along with a pool table, air hockey and movie area. The pool and sauna are on the lower level.
“The whole west side of the house top and bottom is all windows and we have 9-foot ceilings in that basement, so it doesn’t seem like a basement,” Simanski said. “When you look out the windows, that’s all you see is pasture and crops. You don’t see neighbors. You don’t see any of the houses.”
The peaceful, private location with woods nearby is “excellent” for deer hunting, Simanski noted. She said “the wildlife is always awesome.” The property is listed at $1,399,000.
“There’s days when you will see 40 deer in the field right next to the house. We’ve had pictures of deer laying right in the front yard,” Simanski said. “You’ll see multiple hatches of turkeys every year and the mothers will take their hatchlings at a very young age and they’ll go right through the pasture in the backyard.”
With farming tracing back to the settlement of Goodhue County, the county produced and shipped the most wheat in the state in 1872, according to the Minnesota Historical Society. Those high wheat productions quickly turned to diversified products, including limestone in Red Wing and cheese in Pine Island.
Now, as the 2022 Census of Agriculture reported, grains, oilseeds, dry beans, dry peas and hay are the top sale crops. Corn for grain represents 182,876 acres and corn for silage/greenchop was at 7,437 acres.
“It’s in our (Southeast Minnesota’s) heritage and there’s a lot about agriculture goes into our local economy that sometimes is overlooked,” Busch said. “As you’re driving down the road, every section of land has so much value in it that people just take for granted.”
From their country road, Kevin and Margaret Simanski are thankful for the farming opportunities and their views of Frontenac State Park and Wisconsin.
“You update (the property) but you still want to keep the country feel. And we did not take the silos down because they were in really good shape,” Simanski said. “A lot of people take them down, but I wanted to leave them because I thought it added the old farm look to the place.”