Ann Arbor house is whimsical, green and curious

But it is also a repository for discarded material that could have ended up in the landfill: A sturdy glass light shade that turned on its head and is used as a bathroom sink, the soapstone kitchen countertops with a rich patina that once served as the tabletops in a chemistry lab of a old Detroit high school and the walnut and oak discarded by relatives used for trim and to make the stairway that leads to the second floor.

While the Vachons had the artistic and architectural skills to create the Curious House, they also had the building skills to turn the vision into a house. Except for part of the framing, the drywall and the roof, the couple built Curious House themselves, adding another 1,200 or so square feet to the original structure.

Tim is an artist who became a residential designer. Cyndy focuses on arts and crafts. They decided to include in the Curious House some elements Tim has designed for other houses that never made the cut either because they were too expensive or too quirky.

“This was an exercise,” Tim said.

It was also an experiment. The couple wanted to build a home perfect for homeowners looking to downsize but who want to keep elements that make a house special.

“We wanted to build a small, elegant home, but take amenities found in a larger home,” Tim said. “We wanted to downsize the house in terms of scale but not amenities.”

Those amenities include travertine limestone tile in the bathrooms, a large fireplace in the living room with Motawi Tile and deep windowsills in the original part of the house lined with bluestone, which again shows up in the sidewalks around the house and in the fireplace hearth. There are the whimsical metal balusters of the staircase, the fossil stone in a shower and the custom-made bathroom vanity with travertine top and rattan baskets.

There’s also the role of Lake Michigan and Lake Superior stone and tile in the Curious House.

“We have a love affair with stone,” Tim said.

The couple used small stones and large boulders they had collected over the years along the shores of Lake Michigan and Lake Superior.

There’s the stone that surrounds the fireplace, but it also shows up in more surprising places. They put a few stones in the slate floor of the laundry room. Then they put some in the floor of a shower, but grew increasingly bolder, using more stone in the next two bathrooms. Stones crawl halfway up a wall in one of the showers.

The rich golds, greens and creamy terra cotta colors that run throughout the house start with a Motawi Tile collage insert in the floor of the front foyer.

Curious House has a storybook kind of feel, Cyndy said, from exterior cedar wood shingles to the wavy roof lines and the decorative purple brackets on the outside. Inside one of the two attached porches, Tim created a crane out of the cedar shingles.

While it would have been easier to build the house from scratch, the couple resisted razing the old block 1940s-era structure, Cyndy said. That would have been a waste. The house was sound, she said. They looked to use what’s at hand in other ways: They bought a 1970s kitchen hutch for $60 at Treasure Mart but dressed it up with galvanized steel, oak trim and bold colors. They found an antique copper bucket at Treasure Mart that they plan to use as the sink for the kitchen island.

Now that most of the work is done, the Vachons want to sell it, Cyndy said. “Our plan is to go create another one.”