Jack Rendulich
Echoes of Norway Charm an Author’s Storybook Home
Lise Lunge-Larsen mixes elegant and rustic, hence a Christmas table with wooden charger plates beneath fine china and a brilliant red old-style tablecloth contrasting with modern green goblets.
Enter children’s author Lise Lunge-Larsen’s Duluth home, especially at Christmas, and it won’t take long to know her birthplace. Just as “the Troll Lady” fills her storytelling with echoes of her home country’s traditions, so has she filled her home with reverberations of Norway.
“It’s a way of recreating the best of my culture,” says Lise, “the parts of my culture that I love the best.”
Author of seven picture books such as Race of the Birkebeiners, Noah’s Mittens and, of course, The Troll With No Heart In His Body, Lise delights in recounting folk tales, and almost every piece of furniture, artwork and knickknack in her home carries a story. “A house is made into a home by very personal pieces – art, textiles, rugs. We follow our own guiding principles.”
Jack Rendulich
Echoes of Norway Charm an Author’s Storybook Home
A Scandinavian flair fuels her ornaments, like this felt gnome astride a straw bird.
Born and raised in Oslo, Lise (pronounced Lisa) grew up loving books and storytelling – not surprising since her father operated an antiquarian bookstore out of their home. A good student (not counting typing or penmanship), Lise came to Minneapolis in 1973 to visit friends, spent time at Augsburg College with their daughter and ended up in love with student Steve Kuross, who happens to be “three-quarters Norwegian,” she points out.
Love was an incentive powerful enough to enroll at Augsburg, which she did thanks to winning a Crown Prince Harald Scholarship from The Norway-America Association. She got her degree in Minnesota and got married in Norway – to Steve. The couple settled in the Twin Cities, but after Steve completed medical school, the Duluth Clinic had an opening.
The couple secretly never expected to move to Duluth, but felt a job interview would be good practice. They had strict criteria, after all, for where they would live – and Duluth wasn’t on the list. The city then was struggling with an economic downturn. Plus Lise wanted to live by a large body of water, certainly not by some lake, even one called “superior.”
“I was so arrogant, coming from Norway. I thought a lake, huh, I need an ocean.”
Then the couple came over Thompson Hill and were gobsmacked by Lake Superior. “That’s not just a lake; that is an ocean – an inland sea!”
On that day, the pines, birch trees and snow on the ground harkened to home – a Norwegian home. “It’s our landscape,” explains Lise, who found another treasure here. “Everybody was just so great, it was wonderful.”
The interview went well, and soon they were house hunting. A Hunter’s Park neighborhood home immediately appealed to them with its open, almost Scandinavian, airy feeling and big windows letting in lots of light. From first view, says Lise, it felt “just right.”
The two-story, four-bedroom house has modest rooms, but wide archways on the main floor create an open, spacious feel. They loved the fireplace’s lead windows. A 1950s addition gave them a family room and space enough to house Lise’s prize collection of antique books inherited from her parents. Ample enough for their children Emily, Even and Erik, it still suits the empty nesters today. “Even with the kids out of the home, it does not feel too big.”
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Jack Rendulich
Echoes of Norway Charm an Author’s Storybook Home
The more you look, the more you discover in Lise Lunge-Larsen’s home at Christmastime. Vintage gnomes snuggle onto a mantel.
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Jack Rendulich
Echoes of Norway Charm an Author’s Storybook Home
More modern cloth versions scamper up a bookcase next to a wooden traditional casserole carrier on the shelf.
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Jack Rendulich
Echoes of Norway Charm an Author’s Storybook Home
Painting furniture is a Norwegian tradition well represented with the home’s furnishings, large and small, while a special hand-carved “mantle board” becomes a wreath holder for the holidays.
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Jack Rendulich
Echoes of Norway Charm an Author’s Storybook Home
One of three straw goats comes out to remind Lise of her favorite storytelling fairy tale.
After buying the house, they set about removing wallpaper and uncovering wood floors. Three decades later, Lise is still refining, which fits her home philosophy. “I feel like when you work on your home, you are working on yourself. There is always room to change. Let the house talk to you. Spend time and don’t rush into changes. You can tell what the house wants.”
Apparently, Lise’s house craves Norwegian antiques.
She readily admits to a penchant for antique hunting and thrills in finding unique pieces. The larger furniture – even pieces with a Scandinavian flair – mostly came from Midwest antique sales. Many smaller pieces came from Norway, like the old family butter churn by the front door.
One particular heirloom favorite is a mangle board, used before the flat iron to straighten clothes. Lise brought it from Norway, and it doesn’t take much prodding for her to reveal its legend. The wooden board with a handle had a role in courtship customs. “When a young man was interested in marrying, he would carve an elaborate mangle board. He would give this to his love, and if she kept it that meant yes. If she returned it, the answer was no.”
The practice saved face for the boardmaker with its subtle Norwegian “no,” and storyteller Lise couldn’t resist adding the moral of the tale. “Some men gained a lot of practice, becoming extremely good carvers.”
Her heritage guides her love of color. “In the Middle Ages, Norwegians had dark log homes with small windows. When paint was first affordable in Norway, people went crazy. It was a riot of paint. I inherited that sense of color.”
In this house, extensive displays of artwork vibrantly deliver color. Lise’s parents collected art, and she follows their lead. “Don’t buy art as an investment,” she advises. “You must love it. It should speak to you.” Many pieces were created by friends, and Lise has a story behind each one.
Art isn’t only for walls. In Norway, furniture is frequently functional art. “This is a very Scandinavian ethic. Ordinary everyday objects should be beautiful. I grew up with it. I love it.”
Molly Hoeg
Echoes of Norway Charm an Author’s Storybook Home
A gift, this 1853 trunk is painted in the traditional style and represented, in an earlier era, the home of a freed slave.
Marriages of function and beauty fill the home, from large brilliantly adorned cabinets to small intricately carved creations. Her colorfully painted trunks harken to the Viking days when there was slavery in the country. In that era, only free men could own possessions, and freed slaves were often given a trunk as a symbol of their new status. The trunks became treasured family possessions.
Lise proudly points out a trunk with the year 1853 inscribed on the front. It was a gift from her aunt and Lise found a creative way to bring it here. Designating it as “special luggage,” she included it in her airplane suitcase allotment.
As the holiday season arrives, Lise’s philosophy of home decorating truly comes into play. The setting of Norwegian antiques makes the perfect backdrop for her extensive collection of Christmas decorations.
While Norwegian furnishings infuse fantasy into the functional, Norwegian ornaments use functional materials to create fantasy adornments. In their home, straw, pinecones and wood transform into elegant designs. Greenery adorns cabinets and tabletops. Linens, such as table runners, change with the season. You won’t find glitzy plastic holiday tchotchkes in this home.
The longer you look in this home, the more you see. Wreaths, hearts and straw decorations hang discreetly throughout the house. The Christmas tree, tucked behind the living room couch, is a fir festooned with simple ornaments from natural materials. Holly sits atop the dining room cabinet, red berries tuck into a chandelier and the outdoor flower boxes contain seasonal arrangements.
Three large straw goats stand atop the coffee table, a tribute to “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,” Lise’s first oral storytelling choice and now her signature tell-aloud tale.
Gnomes, too, are pervasive. The little gnomes that inhabit the face of the grandfather clock in the dining room are 80 to 90 years old. “There is not much in the way of angels or manger scenes in Norway,” explains Lise. “It’s more the gnomes. We have Christmas gnomes, not elves. And Santa is the Old Gnome.”
As Lise sets the table for her family’s large Christmas Eve dinner, it’s easy to feel steeped in the traditions of the old world. “I don’t like a table too formal. It’s not relaxing.”
The table setting blends rustic and modern. Candles flicker everywhere. “It’s a tradition – candles create a great light. We always have live candles everywhere.”
The dinner menu comes out of Lise’s past and requires resourcefulness to find all the ingredients. Ribbe (pork ribs with fat and rind on them) and Medister Pølske (Norwegian sausage) both come from Ingebretsen’s in the Twin Cities. Norwegian meatballs, red sweet and sour cabbage, beans, mashed potatoes and the required seven kinds of cookies round out the sumptuous meal. Aquavit, a flavored Scandinavian liquor, is necessary to “burn the fat” along with beer and wine.
The family’s traditional jovial meal, with time to talk and linger, used to be unbearable for the children eager to get to presents. But the meal is not done until a light dessert with coffee is followed by cookies and cognac in the living room. Then – finally – family gifts are exchanged.
Lise Lunge-Larsen Collection
Echoes of Norway Charm an Author’s Storybook Home
Lise and her husband, Steve, fell in love at first snowy sight of their Duluth home.
Recalling her childhood Christmas Eves, Lise fondly recounts visits from Santa – called Julenissen in Norway. Her dad would “nap” after their large dinner, surreptitiously climbing out a second-story window. Soon, Santa appeared at the door bearing presents in a duvet cover slung over his shoulder. He was invited in for cookies and cognac (no, not milk). Upon Santa’s departure, her dad would suddenly wake up and rejoin the family to open presents.
Lisa and Steve blend family rituals, beginning with an official start of the season – “We get out the advent calendar” – and notes to Santa. “Then we burned it in the fireplace so it would go like a smoke signal.”
Lise used to insist the tree go up on “Little Christmas Eve” (December 23) a Scandinavian tradition, but the children’s antsy anticipation altered her thinking. They split the U.S.-Norwegian difference and trimmed the tree about two weeks earlier, on the Sunday of the church holiday program. Early tree decorating, though, means Lise must forgo her tradition of keeping the tree up into mid-January. “By the time January rolls around, the tree is done.”
On Christmas Eve, Santa visits and fills the stockings hung over the fireplace – a purely American twist (no Christmas stockings in Norway). The jolly Old Gnome then leaves a personalized note for each child, written with a shaky hand to show he’s come in from the cold. It’s easy to see a storyteller’s handiwork behind this whimsical detail (and the left-handed writing of a right-handed children’s author).
Asked if she has any storytelling traditions at Christmas, Lisa laughs. “Not with my family. Everyone is too busy talking and socializing to stop and listen to my stories!”
Good thing her tales can be read in books or enjoyed in the décor of her storybook home.
Duluth writer Molly Hoeg also likes her home airy and open in the Scandinavian style.