From Sean Spraungel, who built it
I was looking at a piece of property.
I have plenty of space elsewhere — a large garage at the house, large garages elsewhere, land. I did not need a garage condo development and I wasn’t planning on one.
Then I walked it, and the property told me what had to go on it.
Before any of this, I shopped three complexes for myself.
The plan was a business on one side and personal space on the other. Something automotive, and a hundred owners in the building is built-in business for what we were trying to do. I have a lot of classic vehicles myself, so the other half was going to be mine.
I couldn’t do it. The asking price on those units was outrageous for what you got. One of them was a divided pole barn. Another was still a wood-framed building. Nice enough inside, but what I was being asked to buy was essentially a detached garage off a house, at what I’d call three times what it was worth.
And I could put my shoulder through the wall of every single one of them.
That was the part I kept coming back to. The whole point is that you put something valuable in there, you lock the door, you drive away and you don’t think about it again until you come back. I couldn’t get that feeling in any of those complexes. So I shut it down and went on with other things.
Most of these developments start on paper. Somebody with a business degree looks at a parcel, works out how much square footage will fit, works out what it has to sell for to make the number, and that’s the building.
I don’t read a property that way. I read soil, orientation, topography. I can stand on a piece of ground and see how something is going to sit on it.
Here’s what’s on this one.
The buildable ground and the wetland both run true — east to west, north to south. I could see driving in that a complex belonged here. It wasn’t a calculation, it was sitting right there.
There’s wetland between the road and the buildings, and more wetland along the north side. The Hide Out sits behind a moat. Where there isn’t water, the buildings themselves are the barrier — that’s not an accident, that’s how they’re turned.
The buildings on the west side run east to west so the site takes in as much sunlight as it can get. There’s a hill on that side, and trees. Wherever you happen to be standing on this property, you get the sunset over those trees. Every night.
And the first building, the one closest to the street, sits a little higher and is laid out so that when you’re pulling up to the gate, you cannot see in. If a man has his door up, nobody driving past is looking into his unit. You have to be inside to see anything.
East of us is a quiet road and a good neighborhood, and across that road is more wetland and Foster Lake. The place is surrounded by nature. I’m not going to pretend it’s the wilderness — there are houses, and there’s a large truck dealership to the south of us. It’s still quiet in here.
The one that gets people is the freeway. I’ll walk somebody down to the end of the building and tell them I‑94 is a couple hundred yards from where they’re standing, and they don’t believe me, because they can’t hear it. That’s the orientation of the buildings doing that.
What’s between the buildings isn’t accidental either.
When I laid this site out I already knew what people were going to do here. A man with a trailer is going to back it into his suite. He shouldn’t have to jackknife it to get in, and he shouldn’t need somebody standing outside waving him back on the fourth attempt.
There’s 64 feet between our buildings. A city street is 32. You’ve got twice the width of a street to work with out there, which is why I can make a U-turn between them with a full-size truck and a trailer behind it.
And 64 feet means 64 feet. I don’t round.
I designed these buildings myself.
I’m a sixth-generation stonemason. My father, my grandfather and my great-grandfather all worked on prominent projects across the Twin Cities. My great-great-grandfather was a stonecutter who came over from Europe, and his father laid stone there.
Since the dawn of the human race, stonemasons have been the ones who build the buildings that last forever. Go back to the pharaohs. Everything else gets replaced.
I’m not a construction worker. I’m a master stonemason. I can take a rock and a hammer and break it exactly where I want it broken. I don’t need a saw, I don’t need a laser and I don’t need a tape measure. I do it with my eye.
A mason is also the one trade that has to know everybody else’s. An electrician can’t lay brick, but I’m setting the electrician’s boxes as I go up the wall. A framing carpenter can’t cut stone — he doesn’t know how — and I’m cutting wood all the time to build forms for arched windows. Our work runs through every other trade on the job, so we end up knowing all of it.
That’s why I could design these buildings. Not because I can read a plan. Because I’ve had my hands in every part of one.
So when I laid these buildings out, I laid them out on a perfect module for concrete block.
Every wall thickness, every window opening, every door opening works out to full units. Nothing was made to fit. Nothing got fudged in the field. There are no odd cut sizes sitting in this structure where a course had to be chopped down to close a gap.
For a man drilling into his own wall, it means there is solid, consistent block behind the drill everywhere he goes. For a man hanging a door or finishing a corner, it means the opening is square and true because it was drawn to land on a real block joint, not trimmed to land there. Cut work is where a masonry wall gets weak, and where water eventually finds its way in. There isn’t any here.
There are no gutters on this building. No downspouts either — nothing hung on the wall for you to trip over walking around the place.
The roofs are flat and drain to the middle, into central roof drains. There are five-foot overhangs up above. At the ends of the buildings we let the water shed and cascade off into a rock garden.
The parking lot is concrete, not asphalt. In Minnesota, asphalt gives you potholes. Concrete doesn’t. The asphalt out there right now is temporary — it’s only there to get us through construction.
Concrete parking lots. Concrete block walls. Concrete mezzanines, poured as part of the building rather than framed in afterward.
Everything here is overbuilt, overthought and overdone. Much like a Rolex watch.
We build with a lot of products in this country and some of the technology is genuinely good. But nothing has beaten reinforced concrete block on life cycle cost. Nothing.
I can drive past buildings I put up as a foreman thirty years ago and they don’t look much different than the day we finished them. Is the life expectancy thirty years? Fifty? Sixty? I don’t know. I know that in that same stretch of time, metal siding, tin roofs and vinyl all have to come off and go back on.
When we were doing our due diligence on whether to actually do this, I talked to owners at another complex. They were thrilled — genuinely happy — that a hailstorm had come through and damaged their building. Their HOA was staring at a $3.5 million estimate to replace deteriorated siding, and the hail meant insurance might carry some of it.
That’s the part nobody puts in the brochure. When you buy into a building with a skin on it, you’re buying a bill that hasn’t been handed to you yet. It comes as an assessment, and it comes whether you were planning on it or not.
Block doesn’t have a skin. There’s nothing to replace. A tornado isn’t a problem. Hail doesn’t damage our walls. And there is no combustible material in the structure itself.
That’s what permanent means. It isn’t a marketing word here, it’s the material.
The Squarebody suite and the Workshop suite are mine.
I have a lot of trucks and they’re all squarebodies, mostly because I’m a very large person and trucks are what I fit in. Squarebody was the first suite built out on this property. It’s the one we used as the model for everything after it, and it’s the flagship.
And I’d like somebody to come in here and beat it. I am dying for an owner to out-Jones me with his own suite. That’s the whole idea.
Buildings C and D are up. Finished, powered, water in them, a lot and a gate outside, and owners inside.
The rest of the site is graded. The utilities are stubbed. The pads are in.
And I pay the HOA dues on every suite that hasn’t sold. The owners who are here now are not carrying this site while the rest of it fills in. That bill is mine until somebody buys the suite.
I’m not going to hand you a date for when the last building goes up. A projection is a guess with a date stapled to it, and I don’t sell those. What I’ll tell you is what’s true today: if not one more block gets laid on this property, what you bought is a finished suite, in a finished building, on a finished site.
Right now in Minnesota and across the country, people are putting up cheap buildings and charging a premium for the word ownership.
I didn’t set out to compete with that. I set out to build the thing I couldn’t find when I was the one writing the check. A permanent structure. Reinforced concrete block, floor to roof. Laid out by somebody who has spent his life in the trade, on a piece of ground that told him how to do it.
The price per square foot is the same across every suite in this building. Same number for the small one as the big one. There’s no premium for the corner and no discount for the middle, because the building is the same everywhere.
People come in looking for the catch. Better building, lower number — what’s wrong with it?
Nothing. And to be very clear, we’re not cheaper. We’re just not overpriced. I’m not greedy.
I’m not looking at this as an accountant. I’m looking at it as a craftsman — what’s the best thing I can hand the man who buys it. And I’m the mason and the general contractor both, so the masonry on this building isn’t being subcontracted out and marked up on its way to you. I’m not trying to squeeze the last dollar out of every suite on my way out the door. I’d rather sell them and grow this place.
And I deliver what I’m selling. Nobody else can say that.
If you take what every other complex gives you and compare it to what you get at The Hide Out, they all come up short.
Lock the door, drive away, don’t think about it. That was the whole requirement. Everything here comes from that.