Wisconsin runs through it.

We both grew up in Wisconsin and met at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. After college, we moved to Minneapolis, where we live and work today. We currently live in a 100-yr-old bungalow which we’ve restored over the years with additional Arts & Crafts details. We love Minneapolis, but, when we finally retire, we want to have a new adventure.

When we started thinking about what our next step in life might be, we looked back to Wisconsin with its rolling hills, forests, farms and lakes…lots of lakes. Holly is a Pisces, and obsessed with water and boats, and so looking for a lot connected to water somehow seemed like a good idea. We spent a year or two visiting potential areas in Wisconsin that were within a 4-hour drive of Minneapolis. We became interested in the Hayward area, near the headwaters of the Chippewa river. This area is the capital of the Northwestern Wisconsin tourism, with so many things to do with rivers, lakes, forests, biking, etc. 



We also knew we wanted to design and build our own home, vs just buy an existing cabin—though that might have been much less expensive and would have more immediately satisfying! We were fans of Wisconsin’s world famous architect — Frank Lloyd Wright. As architecture fan nerds, we spent many vacations touring FLLW buildings. We appreciated his love of Wisconsin and nature and his organic design philosophy. He believed each home should be designed for its particular site, should respond to the conditions and opportunities there, that its form should evolve organically from its function and its site. Inspired by his ideas, we had been kicking around home design ideas for years.



And we knew that we wanted the home to be more sustainable than a code-built house. Both of us have been activists around issues of sustainability. We’ve used wind-power credits to power our Minneapolis home for several decades. Holly was always interested in sustainable architecture and helped found a Master of Arts in Sustainable Design at MCAD. She was also lucky enough to have had parents that remodeled an old farmhouse in the late 1970s to have passive solar features and a composting toilet from Sweden.

So, with all these ideas in mind, we started looking for land.