Thom Cotton brought his ex-wife with him in 2020 to look at a house he was considering buying near St. Cloud.
“We walked in the door; she walked around for five minutes and said, ‘You’re buying this house,‘” Cotton said, vouching for her good taste.
Tom Olson, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, designed the Clear Lake home starting in 1978. He also lived in it with his partner, artist Merle Sykora, for more than 40 years until selling it to Cotton.
Now, Cotton is moving to be near family in Michigan and has put the three-bedroom, 2,750-square-foot house on the market for $650,000.
“I really didn’t want to leave her — it’s a ‘she,’ by the way,“ Cotton said of the house.
Just as Wright did with many of the buildings he designed — including [Fallingwater](https://fallingwater.org/) in Pennsylvania and [Taliesen](https://www.taliesinpreservation.org/#:~:text=Located%20in%20the%20Driftless%20Region,World%20Heritage%20Site%20in%202019.), his home and school, in Spring Green, Wis. — Olson gave the house a name: Ashera, after ancient Near Eastern goddess Asherah.
That’s not the only way Olson’s work reflects his teacher’s influence. The house is low-slung and horizontal, looking from the front like an unassuming rambler. But its perch above the Mississippi River allows the back of the home’s walls of windows to offer dramatic views of the water, trees and wildlife.
Ashera is grandfathered in, but zoning now requires homes to have farther setbacks from the river, Cotton said.