We never expected to end up living on an island, but here we are. To explain how that came to be—how we moved to a place we didn’t even know existed until our first visit there—we’ll have to go back and explain a few things. 

Who are the “we” of this tale? Glenn Carlson and Michael Childers—together for 27 years and married for four. We were both raised in the Midwest, and so our migration from corporate life in Los Angeles back to the Madison area in 1997 felt like coming home. 

We own a small business on the island, Madeline Island Candles, that helps to keep us engaged with the business community. We’ve been given the gift of serving on various nonprofit boards, as well as the Bayfield School District Board (Glenn) and the Town of LaPointe Board of Supervisors (Michael). These various involvements, our shared worldview, the gift of visiting family and friends, as well as the enjoyment of the island’s year-round and summer residents, all keeps us active and a part of island life.

When vacation becomes location scouting

Our lives changed dramatically in the fall of 2003 when we took a weeklong vacation with two friends. After a beautiful road trip north from the Madison area, through the woods until we caught a ferry in Bayfield, we settled in for the ride across the water.

Madeline is the largest of the Apostle Islands, part of an archipelago in Lake Superior. While the island is slightly larger than Manhattan, the year-round population is approximately just 265 people (no one really knows for sure). During the summer, around Memorial Day, families with summer cottages start to arrive, along with a steady stream of other folks renting cabins, and day-trip visitors streaming off the ferries that run every 30 minutes.

We came in late summer. It was a Northwoods August that seemed perfect that year: warm, sunny days made for hiking in the parks or bicycling around town. Our walking tours included a visit to the museum, various small shops and galleries, and the wildly popular Tom’s Burned Down Café for an occasional adult beverage.

Someone—I can’t remember who—came up with the idea that we should look at real estate. I’ve been told that the worst thing you can do after an amazing vacation is spend your last day looking at homes for sale. We did it anyway—and at the end of our tour we walked onto a vacant property that faced south onto the lake. As we stood looking at sandstone bluffs along the water, we realized we could live there. Right there.

A twist on traditional

The drive home led to the decision to make an offer on the property and hope for the best. Lightning struck, and our initial thought was that we would wait to build a summer cabin—but plans changed.

That Christmas, Glenn’s sister gave us a book called The Cabin, by Dale Mulfinger and Susan E. Davis. Dale is a founder of the Minneapolis Architectural firm, SALA, and is considered a “cabinologist.” We met, chatted about our project, and agreed to meet on Madeline during winter so that Dale could see and get a feel for the site.

With snow on the ground, Dale stomped out his first idea—and then we drove to the Bell Street Tavern where he drew a series of dots on a napkin. Those dots eventually became the plan that we executed. The house was built from 2004 to 2006.

Glenn thought that we were going to build a traditional log cabin, but Michael pushed hard for a more contemporary structure built around an idea.

That idea was the challenge that we presented to Dale as the architect, and the idea that we had in mind was transformation.

Taking the ferry from the Bayfield side and across the water is a transformational experience. Leaving the mainland behind, heading onto the lake toward a distant island shore always makes the muscles in my neck and shoulders relax. 

After landing on Madeline and then weaving through forested roads, paved or gravel, to a remote and quiet spot in the woods, the feeling of change extends. The world left behind drifts away.

We wanted our new place to represent that transformational feeling. During the design process Dale created a wall, a visual blockade that is an impediment to seeing and understanding the world on the other side. 

Passing through the wall brings you home, with a sweeping vista through the woods to the lake beyond. The living space—a glass-enclosed pavilion—creates an area surrounded by ever-changing light and color. There’s a riot of green in the spring and summer while autumn reds and yellows give way to winter white. When the snow falls it feels like we live in a snow globe—protected from harsh, cold elements, and still enveloped by the quiet beauty of drifting white flakes.

A simplified space

The house is small, with a couple of sleeping areas and bathrooms, a study up a flight of skip-step stairs, and a kitchen/dining area that is part of the living pavilion.

The basic design is a grouping of three simple geometric forms: a long, rectangular wall, a cantilevered box, and the pavilion roof formed by an inverted truss.

The floor is a poured concrete slab with in-floor radiant heat powered by a propane boiler. Given that the window wall faces directly south, the roofline was designed to allow passive solar gain in the winter when the sun is low on the horizon, and to shade the floor in the summer when the sun is high in the sky. A highly efficient wood-burning stove can raise temperatures quickly, and we have recently installed a solar system on the roof as part of working toward a carbon-neutral footprint for the house.

It’s a simple structure, easy to maintain, and intentionally constructed to exclude extra closets and places to store “stuff.” As a result, our environment is less cluttered. We are more organized when required trips for supplies take us to the mainland—especially in winter when the last ferry runs at 5:30 and there is no way to jump into the car and run to the store.

What was intended to be a summer retreat turned into a home that we couldn’t leave. Michael moved to the island in 2007, with Glenn following in 2008.

What is it like to live here? On Madeline Island, the rhythm of life is slower and closely tied to seasons. The rush of summer tourism and all its activity gives way to the quiet peace of winter. 

We relish living in this small home, watching eagles fly along the shore as the days drift from spring to winter and back again. Sunrise gives way to sunset and surrounding colors constantly change.

Living on an island in Lake Superior might not be for everyone. For us, though unexpected, it never gets old.

If you find your way to Madeline Island, please stop by the candle shop and say hello. You might find the space to breathe and leave everyday cares on the mainland. Maybe someday, you, too, might find yourself drawn to island life. It happened to us.

Dale Mullfinger, Architect

In 2008 I completed a second home for clients on a Wisconsin island overlooking Lake Superior. The clients asked for something special, and upon my first visit to the site in early spring, I conceptualized a beginning concept by sketching with a twig in the snow. It defined a 100-foot wall slicing the site in half with a portal in the middle to the “other” world of respite and escape. The roof was an upside-down truss sheltering a place at the wall on the retreat side and framing the expansive view at the horizon. Just a sketch, in the snow, ethereal, transient to the upcoming snow melt, but anchored in my mind. Fortunately, a friend was with me to validate it.

I would later transfer that sketch to paper and, over time, develop and transform it into the reality of a program and materiality. But other than the addition of a private space in the form of a blue box, the concept stayed intact and was coaxed into existence through the skilled design development of colleague Dan Wallace.

It indeed was like no other design I had created, just pure, raw, instantaneous invention. Upon completion of the construction many months later, I had the opportunity to stay there with my wife for a weekend by ourselves, to photograph, contemplate, and get her critique as she put the kitchen to use. I have often been able to secure such reflection of my projects, to assess my achievements, and agonize its shortcomings. What I found most compelling was the search for the design’s origins; where had it come from? What recesses of my vocabulary were called upon to invent this creation?

As a design instructor at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Agriculture, I had been teaching that design was a product of hard work and deliberate process that take in a significant number of forces. I taught my students to not rely on the myth of the “big idea,” but that ideas could be revealed through design methods. But in the Lake Superior retreat house I felt otherwise; that the drawing in the snow came from somewhere deep inside me, from a place I didn’t know existed.