BY MARY KRUGERUD
Billee Kraut and Butch Johnson lived in a barn. That’s how they were known around Hopkins and Minnetonka. They were the people who lived in a barn.
When the couple purchased the gray barn on Shady Oak Road in 1990, they merely saw it as an opportunity to expand their home-based music software business, AABACA. But they learned that the barn came with more than just ample square footage. On their first day in residence, two elderly women in babushkas emerged from a house north of the barn and pushed a cart across their yard to a vegetable garden south of it. “Oh goodness, what have we done?” Butch wondered.
What they had done was buy a remnant of one of Hopkins’ original raspberry farms. Most of the farm had disappeared under the nondescript strip mall and townhouses east of Shady Oak Road. The barn on the west side of the road survived, along with the simple white farmhouse, the significance of which they would soon discover.
LIFE ON THE INSIDE
Butch saw their barn living arrangement as a way to relate to the children he taught. “Oh, you live in a great big barn!” they’d say. He explained to them, “No, I live in an apartment in that barn, just like you live in an apartment in your building.” In fact, Butch and Billee insisted that they often forgot they lived in a barn.
Sitting on a sofa in their living space, you would never have guessed that you were in a barn — unless you leaned back to gaze up at the ceiling and realized that the outer wall curved up 14 feet to the ceiling, or a draft carried odors through the barn. “Once in a while, I would get a whiff of hay,” Billie said. The contemporary apartment upstairs was in a part of the hayloft, accessible by a spiral staircase in the silo. In one corner was a little granary section that still had its original walls and served as their home office. Open a door in the hallway and you were staring at the expanse of the remaining hayloft, with its free-standing 1×4 framing and the original sling track. The large hay door had been nailed shut.
Billie said there was a different smell downstairs. “I couldn’t believe that’s just hay I was smelling!” Despite the odors downstairs, the contemporary shipping and storage areas, as well as the computer lab could have been in any suburban office building.
OUT IN THE COUNTRY
Outside, the dormer and the silo drew the eyes of people driving by. The barn’s personality was so impressive that the modern touches scarcely registered with visitors. People, especially those living across from them in the town homes, reacted to the flowers in the summertime, the Christmas lights and stars on the silo in the winter, and the Fourth of July and Halloween decorations to celebrate those holidays. They had the Twin Cities out their front door, and small-town rural Minnesota out the back. There was even an old cow trail on the hill behind the barn. Butch says they had the feeling that they could walk outside in their underwear, and nobody would know. True country living!
Butch and Billee credited their move to the barn with helping their businesses grow because everything was in one place. It gave AABACA, their music software business, a unique identity: The Music Barn.