Category: Habitats
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Quarry House Revisited: An Update on the Project a Year Later
In Door County Living’s fall 2007 issue, I wrote an article about what most people have nicknamed “The Quarry House.” Located on Spring Road in Fish Creek, the house stands in the center of a large, former rock quarry. Owners Mitch and Mary Heinrichs painstakingly created their dream retirement home by drawing up their own […]
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Villibunk: A Modern Look at Scandinavian Design
THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic, Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms. – from “Evangeline” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Nestled in the woods of […]
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Developer Runs into Roadblocks in Affordable Housing Attempt
Take part in any conversation or meeting about Door County’s future and you’ll hear a lot of lip service given to the need for affordable housing. Unfortunately, most of the time, that’s all you get.
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Creative Concrete: Poetry in Non-Motion
“Boredom, really, is what started it all,” he says with a laugh. “Sheer boredom.” This is how Dylan Lauger, founder, owner and operator of Lauger Concrete of Sturgeon Bay, answers the question that everyone asks. Well-known for high quality, dependable, utilitarian flat work (that’s insider-speak for what we laypeople think of as concrete: gray sidewalks, […]
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The Cottage: Everything Old is New Again
Cottage and home rentals, and the traditions that surround them, still abound in Door County. The old adage “the more things change, the more they stay the same” is true of many things in Door County, but is especially true about the history of cottage and vacation home rentals on the peninsula. Around the end […]
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Building Tradition: Door County Churches
It’s a frosty Sunday morning in March and I’ve found myself standing in silence in front of a building I’ve passed by hundreds of times in my life. It’s eerily silent for downtown Fish Creek, and the only sound I hear is the lake wind screeching off the ice and swirling down Main Street from […]
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Anyone with a basic working knowledge of children’s mythology knows the dangers of building a house out of straw: a mere huff or puff from an irritable wolf can take your house — not to mention you — permanently out of commission. A small community of builders and homeowners in Door County, however, are disregarding […]
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If you live in the northern Door area, I’m sure you’ve seen it. If you live anywhere in Door County, I know you’ve heard about it. I am, of course, talking about the “Quarry House” on Spring Road in Fish Creek – a large, French-style manor house set right into a stone quarry that has […]
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Subtleties in Wood: The furniture of Joel Thomas
Customers strolling through the county are exposed to all kinds of artwork – watercolor, pottery, sculpture and photography to name a few. Another medium not always instantly thought of as art is woodworking, unless of course one has seen Joel Thomas’ handcrafted furniture. The detail, the tones of the wood he selects, and the overall […]
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Cooking Up a Restoration: Ellison Bay’s Savory Spoon
Right on the main drag of Highway 57 in Ellison Bay sits a modest, two story home. It is the type of home that a person can drive by quite literally hundreds of times without noticing. It is unassuming and may not spark the interest of the average passerby. The moment it starts to get […]
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The Architecture of Steve Wadzinski
It strikes you immediately. It’s a long, narrow window, no more than a few inches wide on the long west side of the structure. If it were simply turned 90 degrees it could slip by almost unnoticed. Sure, it might register as a bit peculiar, but it’s not the window itself that steals your eyes; […]
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Split, Stack, Stoke: Weathering Winter with a Woodstove
When we first purchased our house, I imagined that I would spend some of the days of the long Door County winter sitting beside the fireplace in the main room. Perhaps I could pass the time with a book and a mug of coffee – what better way is there to spend a January day? […]
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Green. Sustainable. And the seemingly ubiquitous “reduce, re-use, recycle” mantra. What exactly do these words mean, particularly when describing a home? Local licensed architect Virge Temme, designing sustainable buildings since 1992, quickly clears up one source of confusion: “green” and “sustainable” are interchangeable terms. She goes on to explain that “green architecture is a well-reasoned […]
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Centered on the Sun: Solar energy in a timber frame home
On a stretch of land just north of Baileys Harbor three ancient meadows converge. A satellite image of the land, with its dark patches of tamarack and spreading juniper, suggests a lunar landscape unblemished save for a winding stripe left long ago by some wayward adventurer. But the house that has settled into this primitive […]
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Coming to a Shoreline Near You: Phragmites Australis a.k.a. “Phrankengrass”
This is a tale of invasion, the story of an alien grass that is steadily taking over the shorelines and wetlands of Northeast Wisconsin. The bad seed in this story is an exotic, or non-native, strain of phragmites australis, otherwise known as common reed grass. Unfortunately for most residents of the Door Peninsula – human, […]
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It hits us when we’re home alone and we shut off the TV, revealing the eerie silence of an empty house. Sometimes you feel it when you drag the garbage to the curb at night, or for the rurally inclined, to the burning barrel in the back yard. The feeling, the sense, that someone else […]
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The Patricia Shoppe: Bringing Legacies Together Through Renovation
Originally built in the 1880s, the former Egg Harbor Town Hall was the site of town elections and public gatherings (including the popular Saturday Afternoon Movie showing) for over 100 years until finally closing its doors as a public meeting place and government building in 1990. A simple clapboard building with a slightly raised stage […]
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While quaint summer cottages and condominium conveniences appeal to many seasonal residents of the peninsula, for others, there’s simply no place like “home” – away from home that is. A condo is often where it all starts, the day-dreaming, that is, the constant dreaming about the “perfect Door County home.” For Bob Murphy, it began […]
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Stovewood: Pioneer Construction
Between roughly the late 1880s and World War I, a type of construction known as “stovewood” was employed in the United States. Stovewood, Richard W. E. Perrin writes in Historic Wisconsin Buildings: A Survey in Pioneer Architecture 1835-1870, “appears to be the only type of log construction that does not have any clear-cut antecedents in […]
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I’ve seen you do it, and I do it, too: pull over to the side of the road, jump out of the car, and attempt – most often in vain – to capture the essence of a big old wooden Door County barn with a camera. My particular favorites are those slightly or even largely […]