Cottage Cuteness in Wisconsin
Look at this cute little house. "The last remnant of a 1920s Beardstown, Illinois, “cabin court” composed of multiple tiny frame houses just like it, it is a relic of an era when middle Americans vacationed by giddily road-trippin’ with their new automobiles."
"Tereasa Surratt, a creative director and partner at Ogilvy & Mather, whose grandmother lived next door to the broken-down, abandoned cabin, was hell-bent on saving it. “History has value,” says Surratt, who researched the property for years, with the goal of restoring the cabin to its original state. Over its lifetime, the 11-by-11-foot house had served as everything from a pit stop for weary travelers to an illicit gathering place to a hunt club’s cabin to the office of a trucking company. The owner of that company sold it to her in 2006 for $500."
"For Surratt, it was both a mission of preservation and a personal quest: She wanted to restore the house in the woods in honor of her father, who had liked the idea of having a little cabin in which to read books but died of cancer before he was able to see his plans through. Her husband, David Hernandez, and her brother hauled the cabin onto a truck and delivered it to a plot of land she and her husband own in Sugar Creek, Wisconsin."
"The cabin is located on the wooded grounds of Wandawega Lake Resort, which Surratt and her husband, David Hernandez, a creative director at Tribal DDB, purchased in 2003 from a Latvian church. Not open to the public, the resort is a private gathering place for family and friends. And the cabin has become a kind of playhouse for Surratt, who has furnished it with “anything that could have possibly been used here from the 1920s to 1940s.” A virtual prop house, it has been used as a location for film and print. (The cabin has no plumbing; guests use kitchens and bathrooms elsewhere on the property.) Vintage books, fishing rods, lanterns, Hudson Bay blankets, and dishes that Surratt dug up at flea markets and barn sales make guests feel as if they’re staying on the set of A River Runs Through It, one of her favorite films."
