Some projects are decks. Split Rock was a full backyard reimagined around an icon of Minnesota. A worn-out 6-by-12 wood platform, roughly three and a half feet high and long past its useful life, became four distinct outdoor rooms wrapped around a 24-foot fiber-optic feature wall recreating the Split Rock Lighthouse on Lake Superior.
The client, a proud Minnesota native, wanted usable square footage he could enjoy through as much of the Minnesota year as possible, along with genuine privacy on a wide-open lot with no tree coverage. We organized the space into a dining area off the kitchen doors, an outdoor living room, and a hot tub surround on the L-shaped deck, with three 16-foot-wide stair treads stepping down to a stamped-concrete fire pit patio ringed by hanging swings.
The feature wall is a living scene. Working from a silhouetted photograph of the bluffs against sky and water, we built a fiber-optic starscape studded with twinkling pinpoint lights and washed in color-changing backlighting that recreates the aurora borealis. The real lighthouse runs a 10-second flash beacon, so we embedded a miniature beacon in the wall’s lighthouse opening — watch long enough and you’ll see it fire. Every effect is controllable by app or remote.
Because there were no trees on this exposed lot, privacy had to be built rather than borrowed. We layered the feature wall, custom plasma-cut lattice we designed and cut in-house, and stone-clad knee walls into boundaries that block wind and sightlines while keeping the space open. Just as important is what you’ll never see: a hidden network of serviceable conduit chases carries every fixture to a dry cavity beneath the deck, so every light can be maintained for decades.
And for the homeowners, there’s a secret hidden in the starscape — their own zodiac constellations, placed by their birthdays and drilled into the night sky. This project earned recognition at the 2022 NADRA National+ Deck Competition, but its truest measure is that the owner leaves the lights on year-round and takes his morning coffee looking out at it.