Original subtitles

I grew up in the Midwest.

And some of my friends would go to the cabins on the weekend.

And I thought, oh, that sounds so fun to get away.

So Annie and I, we got the itch to find a cabin,

and we did that.

With my generation, we often go to school in one city,

and then get our first job in another city.

And I don't really know anybody in my generation

who actually owns a cabin.

And the woods around here,

I call them "walk anywhere woods" because they're just--

they're full of life and there's not a lot of underbrush.

You can walk anywhere.

And it's beautiful here.

The rolling hills and the glaciers

did us a huge favor, just how they carved the land up.

We are in Northwestern Wisconsin,

in one of our family's cabins out in the middle

of a restored prairie.

My family immigrated from Denmark

right after the turn of the century,

from a farm much like this.

This is MetalLark Tower.

Not Meadowlark, but MetalLark, given

the nature of the tower and all the steel that holds it high.

Now that my kids are out of car seats

and actually can handle an hour and a half drive,

they love coming up to visit MetalLark.

We pull in, and we drive up to the top of the hill,

and we park.

And right there is an entrance to a path that cuts

through the wildflower meadow.

Pretty much we open the doors, they're off

and they're just running through the meadows.

The idea for these cabins started about five years ago.

I often go on canoe rides with my dad.

And we were canoeing down the river, coming around a turn,

and there's this beautiful bluff.

I leaned over to my dad.

And I said, wouldn't it be cool just

to have a little, tiny house on the top of that bluff?

And he agreed.

And we started talking about it.

Coincidentally, around the same time, one of my co-workers

came back from a weekend trip.

She showed me pictures of this just

beautiful cabin that was unlike a lot

of the cabins in the region.

And I said, I want to stay there.

I looked up the reservation calendar,

and they were booked for almost two years out.

I kind of joked.

I said it would be easier to build a cabin,

or faster to build a cabin, than to get

a reservation at this place.

And that kind of got the conversation

going more and more.

And we started writing letters to different landowners

to see if they would ever consider

selling a little plot of land.

There's no shortage of cabins in this area.

But most of them are kind of these 1920s

cabins with knotty pine or the bearskin rugs.

We wanted, when we built this, just

to build something different, something that

was just more open, more airy.

We wanted a lot of glass, a lot of wood.

That was the-- that dug for the real warm tone.

And so that even in the winter, you still

felt cozy, but surrounded.

When you arrive here, you see the cabin

between a canopy of trees.

We have kind of an unusual layout in that it's inverted.

When you walk in on the lower level,

you're actually walking in on the sleeping level.

We did that so that we could get these big, tall ceilings.

It's cantilevered

so far that from the south and the east,

it really looks like it's levitating.

As the prairie grasses grow up more and more,

you can't really see the foundation.

And it's just kind of this box--

floating.

The whole cabin,

it kind of looks like kind of an ice cube of glass

got wrapped in a little wool sweater of steel.

Yeah.

Whoever thought rust could be such a good thing?

Because I was raised to believe that if something rusted,

that's a bad thing.

And now, actually, it's a beautiful thing.

When designing this cabin with all the glass

in this harsh, northern climate, we had

to think about the nighttime.

Heat radiates through glass rather quickly.

So we positioned the cabin facing

south, southeast, to capture that winter sun in the glass.

But the back side of the cabin is 16 to 18 inches thick,

solid foam, way more insulated than the cooler

you take camping.

The 140 acres here at this property

is just a really beautiful place.

And it's big enough to have different people here

at the same time, enjoying it.

And having a cabin that others can enjoy

is really special for us.

It helps bring people here to Northwestern Wisconsin to kind

of experience community and what it's

like being out in nature here.

For a long time I've been interested

in tiny apartment design.

I found this Italian made Murphy bunk bed

that folds up into a closet.

We were able to squeeze this bed into a little desk

space next to the kitchen.

And boom, you can actually sleep two people there.

Waking up to that view is probably the best

view in the entire cabin.

In the process of building MetalLark,

another dream of mine was to build a second cabin.

So Longhouse is like a grace gift.

I am a 10 year--

nearly a 10 year cancer survivor.

And in the very worst of the worst of the chemo

and the surgery and the recovery from the surgery,

my sanctuary was our cabin.

It was just such a gift to be able to go there and be

in a space that was different from home,

that was different from the hospital,

and just be and re-energize.

And so many cancer patients don't have that opportunity.

So when we started talking about this idea,

I said the one thing I really, really wanted to do

was to build a cabin that was accessible to a person

with a wheelchair or walker, or somebody just facing a really

difficult time in their life.

One thing that's been really fun about the process

of building these two cabins has been the opportunity

to spend time with my parents.

Not many people in their upper 30s

get to take a day or two off work

and go up north and clear trails with their dad,

or to do countless things with their mom.

It's unusual to have

intergenerational collaboration, in my experience.

And to work together on something like that,

and to draw on the strengths of each other,

has been such an awesome experience.

You don't get that opportunity very often.