By Dale Mulfinger
In the early 1960s, I went with a college pal to his parents’ cabin in northern Minnesota. I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s when I became a cabinologist. I was a prairie farm boy who knew something about nature, weather, and the seasons, but when I visited that cabin on Lake Vermilion, my eyes were opened to some of nature’s finer points.
You know what I mean: the way the night sky out there is ridiculously bright with stars. The deep quiet of the woods before anybody else is up. The smell of wood smoke. The startling tug of a fish on the line. For me, that trip revealed a new world. All the images, feelings, experience of cabin life sank in deep and never left me. I was hooked and I wanted a cabin of my own.
GETTING STARTED
I’m an architect in Minnesota, where, if you’re nuts for cabins, there are worse jobs to have and less advantageous places to live. Years ago, not long out of school, I designed and built a cabin for my young family just an hour from our Minneapolis home. It was simple and practical and not much more than a screened-in sleeping porch in the woods without a house attached. But it let us get away from the traffic and television for a weekend or for a week and live simply (or simply live).
It wasn’t the tiny cabin but nature, weather, the seasons (at least spring, summer, and fall – when we used it) that drew us out there. Covered from the rain, we read to each other and played checkers under the rattling roof. When the sun came out, we hunted mushrooms and scanned the poplars for chickadees and waxwings. We went to bed early and got up early. It was a treat.
At about that same time, I designed my first cabin for a client. It was larger, more complicated, and better equipped than mine, but it taught me that, unlike a lot of city houses, it is rare for any two cabins to be quite the same. Since then, I’ve designed more than 50 cabins, cottages, lodges, and camps (that’s something else I learned: what you call a cabin depends on where in this country you live), and, as I write this, I have several more on the drawing board. Safe to say, I’m as hooked on cabins as I was 40 years ago.
I’LL SHOW YOU
You don’t have to be an architect to design, build, renovate, or much less buy the cabin you want. Nearly every cabin owner I know is like you (which means you’re probably not an architect), and most of the cabins I’ve visited and written about were designed by somebody other than an architect (and frequently built by somebody other than a builder). If you’re starting from scratch, or if your fantasy involves either a heavy-duty update or an addition to an existing cabin, you’d find the services of an architect to be helpful. But essential? No, usually not.
As far as that goes, you don’t have to live an hour from a lake in the Land of Sky Blue Waters or some other state’s equivalent. A cabin can go almost anywhere – mountain, woods, coastal dunes. People tend to want their cabin close to something they love or love to do. Skiers and snowboarders are drawn to mountains; sailors, swimmers, and anglers to water; and birdwatcher to woods.
A reasonable proximity to home is nice, especially with the price of gas, but nearness to home is no more of an essential than an architect is. For most cabin folk, the basic idea of a getaway is to get away. If that means a commute across three states, so be it.
The point is, either by design or happenstance, your cabin will be or should be pretty much what you want it to be and where you want it to be. Few of the things we own better reflect our true selves than our cabins. That’s because, whatever else we use it for – family reunions, the guys’ fishing weekend – that cabin is where we unwind, kick back, decompress, and get back to being ourselves, all under the happy fiction that we’re light years away from civilized society.
Minnesota architect and cabinologist DALE MULFINGER has designed cabins all over North America. He teaches a class on cabin design at the University of Minnesota School of Architecture. He is the author of the best-selling, The Cabin, published by The Taunton Press.
This excerpt is from Cabinology, 2008. His next book on cabins is due out in 2013.
