Diamond Lake sits at the southern edge of Minneapolis’s Nokomis area, just below Minnehaha Creek, and its housing stock tells a surprisingly complete story of how south Minneapolis grew decade by decade — from the Craftsman bungalows of the 1920s through the ramblers and split-levels of the postwar years. Mac Grove Painting works regularly throughout this part of the city, and the variety of exterior surfaces here keeps that work genuinely interesting.
What sets Diamond Lake apart from neighboring areas in the Nokomis section is the particular concentration of 1930s Period Revival architecture — Tudor and Tudor-adjacent styles with stucco cladding, half-timbering details, and occasionally brick or stone veneer. These homes require careful surface preparation before any paint or coating goes on, because stucco that has seen nine decades of Minnesota freeze-thaw cycles can develop hairline cracks that need to be addressed before they become something more serious. Alongside those Tudors, the wood-sided bungalows on streets like Portland Avenue and Roslyn Place present their own demands: older fir and pine siding holds paint differently than modern engineered wood, and matching sheen levels across repainted trim and previously painted body surfaces takes some experience to get right.
Postwar Homes and a Wooded, Park-Adjacent Environment
By the time the neighborhood filled in through the 1950s and into the 1960s, the architectural character shifted toward lower-slung forms — hipped-roof ramblers, Cape Cods, and eventually the elongated single-story ramblers that became common on streets near Diamond Lake Park. Many of these homes have brick accents or full brick fronts paired with painted wood soffits, shutters, and trim. That combination of unpainted masonry and painted wood is one of the more common exterior situations we encounter in the area, and getting the transitions clean between those materials matters a lot for how the finished job reads from the street.
The park adjacency is worth noting from a practical standpoint. Diamond Lake Park functions as a wildlife refuge, and the wooded, shaded lots near it — as well as along Minnehaha Parkway — tend to retain moisture longer than more open suburban sites. Shaded north-facing siding in particular can be prone to mildew if a paint job isn’t approached with the right product selection and surface prep. These are the kinds of environmental factors that don’t show up in a brochure but matter considerably for how long an exterior paint job holds up through Minneapolis winters and wet springs.
The neighborhood has stayed predominantly single-family and well-maintained over the decades, and that pride of ownership is visible in how homes on blocks like 60th and 62nd Streets present themselves. Some of the larger bungalows and Tudors have seen upper-story additions in more recent years, which can introduce mismatched exterior finishes that a thoughtful repaint can bring back into visual coherence. Whether a home in Diamond Lake is original to the 1920s or has evolved across several generations of ownership, the exterior deserves paint work that respects what the house actually is.