Trust Worthy

Architects, builders, and their clients typically share a healthy trust, established and reinforced during a series of meetings and reviews running the length of the design and construction process. Sometimes, however, that trust is based on little more than a terse set of instructions and some well-placed faith.

Such was the case back in 1949, when a South Dakota family man, after vacationing near Ludlow’s Island Resort on Lake Vermilion, asked Hod Ludlow, the resort’s owner and a builder of local repute, to design and build a cabin for him on land he had purchased a stone’s throw away. His requirements were few: Do it economically and expeditiously, and make sure all the rooms face the water. The man then drove home to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. A short time later, Ludlow mailed him a contract with assurances the cabin would be ready the following summer.

Which it was—a lovely, motel-style structure whose every room did in fact front the lake. Ludlow had strung the cabin’s five bedrooms, bath, kitchen/dining area, and living room along a covered outdoor walkway that afforded, say, fresh air and an unimpeded vista of the starlit lake on a midnight stroll to the bathroom. During waking hours, the walkway encouraged an outdoor lifestyle unusual even at a northwoods retreat. Though the cabin also features a handsome fireplace and a patio by local mason Ole Swanson, windows handcrafted by carpenter Charlie Pohl, and Ludlow’s own rich detailing, vacation life immediately centered on the walkway and adjacent terrace, where the family communed with the deer and chipmunks beneath the occasional shadow of a passing eagle.

Four generations have now enjoyed summers at the Vermilion cabin. The bond forged by the patriarch and the builder grew tighter when the former’s son married one of Ludlow’s daughters. It was she, by the way, who initiated one of the few changes made to the cabin in its fifty-eight years: the addition of a wooden animal cutout to the screen door of each bedroom. Since the doors all look alike, she reasoned, something was needed to tell the rooms apart. They could trust the iconic images to prevent confusion.

Dale Mulfinger, a partner in Twin Cities–based Sala Architects, teaches architecture at the University of Minnesota. Cabinology, his fourth book, will be published this fall by The Taunton Press.