READ MORE FROM OUR CABINS FEATURE HERE.
Where It’s Just Us
THE MAMEROWS | FERRYVILLE
Kevin and Chelsea Mamerow’s cabin is … minimalist.
Nestled in one of the Driftless Area’s signature steep valleys, it sits on 3 acres but has only a postage stamp of flat ground – just enough for a firepit and a place to park a car or two. It’s not on a lake; the Mississippi River is a 1.5-mile trek.
The nearest reliable cellular signal is about a mile away. There’s running water, sort of, but it only goes to the kitchen sink and requires filling a holding tank with water they bring.
And it’s perfect for them.
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“It’s a rustic, Amish-built log cabin and it feels like you’re in the middle of nowhere,” Kevin says. “You just disconnect. You’re totally living the slow life, and that’s the appeal of it.”
Kevin is an electrician and Chelsea is this magazine’s art director, and the family includes three boys aged 13, 11 and 4. At the cabin, they listen to music (curated and downloaded ahead of time) and play a lot of board games.
They use their little boat to explore the islands and backwaters of the Mississippi for sandy swimming beaches. They grab lunch and a drink at the Wooden Nickel a few miles away in town, where everyone, including 4-year-old Clay, is welcome to belly up to the bar.
Kevin had always wanted a cabin getaway and bought the property with his father, Peter Mamerow, in 2015, before he met Chelsea and her boys. Since then, it’s evolved from an escape for father and son or a hangout for 20-something friends to a special place for family time.
“It is different for [the boys] to unplug while we’re out there and not have the same access to their devices and be forced to do a puzzle,” Chelsea says. “There’s a connection that happens a lot easier than it does when you’re at home – when it’s just Kevin and I or when it’s the whole family. There’s no distraction. You’re just with each other.”
The Heartwood of a Family
THE DROSNERS | CRIVITZ
In the first photo of me at my family’s cabin, neither one of us was quite finished yet. My mom is standing next to a wall, a rubber gloved hand heaping with mortar-like chinking about to be smeared into the gap between two of the logs. I’m barely visible – a little bump just above her jean shorts.
The cabin and I were born the same year, 1977, to an idealistic, young hippie couple with a back-to-the-land ethos. Dennis and Carol Drosner had no money but did have real estate connections Up North, and they built by hand what would become a treasure, the true soul of our future family, using logs cut from my uncle’s property, scavenged materials and the labor of loved ones.
It wasn’t much at first. But as my younger sister Stacey and I grew, so did our log sibling. Electricity was added, then running water, then a TV (for Packers games), then an addition with a bathroom that finally rendered the outhouse obsolete after 18 years. I shingled the addition’s roof with my dad and helped raise the wall frames for a garage a few years later.
The cabin is a hub of memory-making: hunting camps, fishing weekends, birthday and graduation parties, my folks’ “woodtick festivals,” family reunions, a few Christmases, a wedding. Campfires, woodcutting, treasure hunts for visiting kids, so many games of horseshoes, Scrabble, darts, cornhole, sheepshead. Jarts. Remember Jarts? We Drosners like to play games.
Everyone who comes here wants to come back; the few that don’t, well, we just weren’t going to get along anyway.
Now, different squeals of delight fill the air as a new generation comes to love the cabin.
For me and Stacey – and now her daughters – it’s where we learned to be people. And the people you are at the cabin are the best kind of people.
Modern Escape, Rustic Soul
THE JANECEKS | ST. GERMAIN
Ryan Janecek wanted to have it all – and he got it. The owner and co-founder of Northern Ground, a Milwaukee digital studio, has a cozy cabin on a quiet lake, but it’s also packed with tech: fiber internet, smart lighting, Wi-Fi-connected climate control, even multiple webcams.
Does it make him a “total hypocrite,” he wonders? Nah. “I could be in Chicago at a software conference and waiting to take my turn, and I pull a camera up and I look at the lake and the pier and watch deer run around and it’s like, that’s it,” he says. “That’s my prescription.”
Janecek, his wife, Sara, and daughter Grace, 14, bought the cabin on Lake Alma near St. Germain in 2022 – an extremely competitive time to buy a lake property Up North. The big decision came after several years enjoying the Northwoods in a more transient manner – camping, renting Airbnbs and towing an Airstream – that, looking back, Janecek sees as calibrating what they wanted in their own place.
What that looks like is a tidy, 1,300-square-foot midcentury home built in 1969 on a property that was converted from a classic Northwoods resort. It sits above a quiet, no-wake lake that connects to a larger, “full recreational” lake.
Neighbors are plentiful and friendly – perhaps a third of them live there year-round – but just far enough away to ensure seclusion. “It’s a very back-in-time, kind of vintage, old-school vibe,” Janecek says.
Just a few years into the sizable investment, the cabin has been worth every penny – something they may want to keep forever. “It’s one of the best things we have ever done,” he says. “It’s the time together and a place to have family and friends and just make memories.”
