Call of the Wild: Three Rustic Retreats in Which Nature Takes Its Course
BY NORA BURBA TRULSSON
Evensong Spa at Heidel House Resort, Green Lake, Wisconsin
Judith Testani, Testani Design Troupe | Riccardo Cattapan, CMD Architects | Scottsdale, Arizona
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEN HAYDEN
 The Evensong Spa in Green Lake, Wisconsin, glows like a lantern at dusk.
On their way to discuss the design of a proposed spa for a resort in south-central Wisconsin, Scottsdale architectural designer Riccardo Cattapan and interior designer Judith Testani, who teamed on the project, made a side trip to Milwaukee. There, they toured the Santiago Calatrava–designed pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum and browsed the museum store.
"We found a small metal labyrinth at the store," recalls Cattapan, "a desk accessory. You're supposed to run your fingers over it and find balance." They purchased the round metal disc and realized they'd found the inspiration for the design of a new spa for Heidel House Resort, a popular getaway located on the banks of Big Green Lake.
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Warm, natural materials provide a backdrop for a soothing soaking tub. |
Testani and Cattapan came to the project through the builder, who had worked with the design team on several Elizabeth Arden Red Door Spas throughout the country. The resort's ownership, Fiore Companies, was interested in expanding and updating the resort, which includes historic summer homes that date to the 19th century, and making the resort as popular in winter as it is in summer.
The proposed expansion was slated for a 40-acre wooded parcel located across the street from the main resort compound. Cattapan master-planned the parcel to include the new spa, a hotel expansion, residential units and retail spaces. He also did the architectural design for the 15,000-square-foot spa building, which was nestled next to the woods.
 The indoor labyrinth is at the center of the spa's design. Flooring is slate-like ceramic tile, interspersed with river rocks. Glass lighting pendants, hung in wall niches, are meant to look like icicles.
Testani and Cattapan suggested an indoor labyrinth as the centerpiece of the spa, around which all the other functions would radiate. "The building was designed from the inside out," says Testani. With the 2,000-square-foot labyrinth at the core, the floorplan includes a reception lobby, spa store, café, movement studio, locker rooms, relaxation room and 12 treatment rooms. The public areas were placed at the front of the building, while treatment rooms and locker rooms are located toward the back.
While the original resort buildings are a potpourri of architectural styles and eras and separated visually from the spa site by a street, Cattapan found inspiration for the new spa building in the Prairie style of Wisconsin's native son, Frank Lloyd Wright. In elevation, the building features broad, low lines and deep roof overhangs. While the area's northerly climate doesn't encourage the development of extensive outdoor facilities, Cattapan blurred the line between indoors and out with the extensive use of window walls, which link spa guests to the locale's woodsy setting. Additionally, skylights, such as the three circular ones in the labyrinth, bring additional daylight into the interior. Exterior materials include poured formed concrete, rusted steel and wood, including cedar shingles.
| A stone fireplace warms the lobby, which is anchored by boldly scaled furnishings. |
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Inside, Testani chose to create a warm, inviting environment, as appealing in deep December as on a warm July day. She chose a color palette that works off the four seasons, using livelier colors such as kiwi green to evoke spring, for example, in the café, and muted autumnal shades of butterscotch, brown and slate for the lobby.
She used a slate-like Italian ceramic for much of the spa's flooring. The tile was cut puzzle-style for the indoor labyrinth and laid out in a circular pattern interspersed with strips of small smooth river rocks. Testani also chose sculptural light fixtures to highlight certain areas of the spa, such as Leucos' Glo pendants, long tubes of blown Murano glass that hang like icicles in niches along the labyrinth's perimeter walls.
 Glass window walls link the relaxation room to the spa's forest setting.
Against the building's strong architectural lines and materials, Testani chose boldly scaled furnishings and accessories, including deep wood armchairs and rusted metal coffee tables for the lobby and sculptural leather seating for the café. Old mill wheels hang in an arc on the lobby's stone fireplace surround.
The spa was completed in fall 2006, just in time for what was once considered the resort's "off" season. The opening has given Midwesterners a reason to come to Green Lake in the cold season.
"What I like most about this building," says Testani, summarizing its design, "is how it looks when you approach it up the drive in the early evening. With all the lights on, it glows like a warm, inviting beacon in the woods."
Architectural design: CMD Architects, Scottsdale, AZ; (480) 990-1850 or www.cmdarchitects.com.
Interior design: Testani Design Troupe, Scottsdale, AZ; (480) 945-8200 or www.testanidesigntroupe.com.
Builder: Tri-North Builders, Inc., Madison, WI; (608) 271-8717 or www.tri-north.com.
Hidden Meadow Ranch, Greer, Arizona
Suzanne Urban, ASID, IIDA | Studio 4 Design | Phoenix, Arizona
 New construction at Hidden Meadow Ranch includes fractional-ownership log homes.
The horse barn is the first thing that visitors see when they pull up the long gravel drive at Hidden Meadow Ranch, a luxurious cabin-style resort in eastern Arizona's White Mountains. Upon check-in, a cowboy arrives on horseback to show guests to their accommodations. And, if guests still haven't a clue that the resort is where "horses are the golf," boot scrapers and stiff brushes for mud greet guests at each cabin door.
Credit for carrying out the resort's cowboy rustic-but-luxurious theme in the cabin interiors, main lodge and check-in facility goes to Phoenix interior designer Suzanne Urban, a principal of Studio 4 Design in Phoenix, who came to the project after she'd worked on the resort owners' offices in metro Phoenix.
 The dining room in the fractional-ownership home overlooks the meadow.
"The owners told me they wanted an upper-crust, Ralph Lauren feeling for the resort," says Urban. "They wanted to create a place for people who don't want to camp, but like a wilderness experience."
The history of the remote 150-acre ranch, dotted with pines and aspen and surrounded by national forest, dates back to 1916, when it was homesteaded by John Chellis Hall, who ran cattle on the property. In later years it became a church retreat, complete with some 10 dormitory-style log cabins and a main lodge building. The present owners, Casey and Tim Bolinger and Jeanne and Gary Herberger, purchased the ranch with the intent of developing it into a resort retreat centered on horseback riding.
 The sitting room of one of the original cabins includes custom seating and a stone fireplace.
"The buildings were wonderful log structures," recalls Urban, who began the project in 2002. "We really didn't do anything structurally to them." Instead, says Urban, pink bathtubs and bunk beds were ripped out, and the cabins were outfitted with new fireplaces, a small kitchen area for morning coffee and spa-style bathrooms that include deep soaking tubs and slate countertops.
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All of the original cabins were renovated to include a Western motif. |
Each cabin, which can sleep up to five people, was themed to some aspect of Western life or nature, and detailed to carry out the theme. For each space, Urban designed custom, overstuffed seating for the conversation area next to the fireplace, and had woodsy headboards and chandeliers custom made by local craftsman Trent Penrod. "We tried to use local craftspeople and tradespeople as much as possible," the designer notes.
 Cabin bathrooms were outfitted with deep soaking tubs.
Urban finished off the cabins with a mix of textiles, including Pendleton blankets and serape fabrics. She collaborated with the owners in locating appropriate art and accessories, combing antiques shops, trade shows and even eBay to get the right look.
 A sapling headboard is in keeping with the cabins' rustic motif.
The main lodge building, once a dining hall, was revamped into the resort's elegant restaurant and lounge, where guests can relax in front of a 35-foot-tall granite fireplace and huge windows overlooking the meadow. "We revamped the kitchen, the bar, and brought everything up to code and made it ADA compliant," says Urban. Remodeling also converted two existing structures into a check-in center and a resort shop.
 A bedroom in the fractional-ownership home includes a comfortable sitting area.
Urban's involvement with the project didn't end with the resort itself. Some two dozen-plus fractional-ownership vacation homes are being built just beyond the guest cabins, and Urban plans to give each spacious two-story home its own unique look.
Interior design: Studio 4 Design, Phoenix, AZ; (602) 957-4440 or www.studio4designphx.com.
Headboards and chandeliers: Trent Penrod, The Burly Bear, Pinetop-Lakeside, AZ; (928) 367-2327 or www.theburlybear.com.
Custom seating: Pacific Furniture, Phoenix, AZ; (602) 258-7829 or www.pacificfurn.com.
Wine Silo, Teton County, Wyoming
Eric Logan, AIA | Carney Arichitects | Jackson, Wyoming
PHOTOGRAPHY BY PAUL WARCHOL
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A silo stores a private wine collection and offers a rooftop deck for sipping and viewing. The silo, covered in weathered steel, is connected to an office/gym/entertainment building, made from reconstructed timbers. |
It's said that architects pray for a great site and a great client. Eric Logan, principal of Carney Architects in Jackson, Wyoming, got both when it comes to ongoing residential work for a client's scenic, 160-acre property north of Jackson. Carney's most recent project for the site is a three-level wine silo, designed to house the owners' wine collection and to provide an aerie from which to view the Tetons while enjoying a glass of pinot noir.
The clients, a family of four from Phoenix, bought the property in the 1990s to use as a vacation retreat. They fell in love with the locale, a riparian zone laced with spring creeks and ponds not far from the Snake River. Elk reside on the land, and there are views not only of the Tetons but of other mountain ranges as well.
"The wine silo is the fourth project we've done on this property for the owners," says Logan, who worked on its design with intern architect Jeff Lawrence. "We did a main house in 1995, then a combination office/gym/entertainment building in 1999, and, later, a covered bridge that leads to a remote site on the property."
 The silo overlooks the scenic property, which is laced with creeks and ponds.
When the owners expressed an interest in building a structure for their burgeoning wine collection, they were confident that Logan could envision something creative. "The site is actually in a floodplain," Logan says, "so a traditional cellar wouldn't work here." Instead, the husband came to Logan with rough sketches of a cylindrical building, and Logan came up with an elevated structure, one inspired by both regional agrarian structures and by the woodsy appeal of a wine cask.
Rather than placing the wine silo separately on the property, Logan suggested connecting it to the office/gym/entertainment building, itself a rustic, two-story structure made from the reconstructed timbers of two 150-year-old cabins dismantled and moved from the East Coast. "The wine silo is essentially an entertainment building, so it made sense to connect it to the other building," says Logan.
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The passage to the wine silo from the office/gym/entertainment building is clad in glass. The radius door is clad in zinc.
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In plan, a passage connects the main entertainment building to the 300-square-foot wine silo, which measures 14 feet in diameter inside. A spiral staircase leads from the first level to the second level of wine storage, and then to a turret-style roof deck, capped by a round, pitched roof.
Structural vertical fins ring the perimeter of the silo's interior; the fins also organize the wine collection, which is stored along the perimeter. Logan placed two six-inch-wide slots of glass that run floor to ceiling in the silo's perimeter to provide daylight and snippets of views.
Logan suggested rugged, honest materials that would age well in the northerly climate. The silo's exterior, as well as its roof, is covered in a series of 3/8-inch-thick steel plates, patinaed to age to a ruddy brown hue. The passage to the wine silo from the main entertainment building is clad in glass. While the glass on the north side of the passage remains uncovered, the south side is protected by a series of perforated oxidized steel screens. The same screening was used to protect the silo's south-facing glass slot. The radius door to the wine cellar is clad in zinc. Inside, wood for the flooring and stair treads came from a dismantled Canadian sawmill.
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A spiral staircase leads past the wine storage and up to the roof. The flooring and stair treads are made with reclaimed wood.
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The sheltered roof deck, the final destination for the wine sampling, is accessed through a motorized steel hatch in the deck's floor. The deck's railing is made of curving glass panels, allowing guests unobstructed views when seated.
Completed in 2005, the wine silo has provided the owners with a handsome spot to enjoy vintages and views. It's also won Carney Architects several design awards.
Architecture: Carney Architects, Jackson, WY; (307) 733-4000 or www.carneyarchitects.com.
Builder: Bontecou Construction, Inc., Jackson, WY; (307) 733-2990 or www.bontecouconstruction.com.
Lighting: Dave Nelson & Associates, LLC, Littleton, CO; (720) 981-4560.
Interior woodworking: Spearhead Timberworks, Nelson, BC, Canada; (250) 825-4300 or www.spearheadtimberworks.com.
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