Little House in the Coulee

Stephanie Arado wasn’t looking for anything fancy—she “just wanted to find some space.” A violinist with the Minnesota Orchestra, Arado spent a good deal of her spare time scouring the region before she found that space, three years ago, in a coulee near Pepin, Wisconsin. She fell in love with the area’s rolling terrain and quaint little river towns, just a few miles from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s birthplace and only an hour and a half from her own Minneapolis home.

Soon after purchasing the thirty-two acres of converted farm land surrounded by dense woods, Arado showed it to St. Paul–based architect Geoffrey Warner. All she wanted now, she told him, was “a wee little house” on the property—“the first building in my estate.” She knew Warner to be an inventive designer and was confident he’d come up with exactly what she wanted.

Warner, as it happened, had been contemplating a fresh approach to premanufactured housing. Arado’s space would provide the ideal venue for a prototype, and her request even suggested a name for the enterprise. Within a year of their conversation, he had the first edition of a line of compact modulars called weeHouses on a truck—headed for her Wisconsin coulee.

Now Warner’s snug, fourteen-by-twenty-four-foot cottage gives Arado both basic shelter (sans electricity and plumbing) and the idyllic getaway she dreamed about. In her spare time, light years—if only ninety miles distant—from the big city, she’s hard at work on an orchard and bocce court. Away from her music, she has the perfect place to let her imagination soar.

Dale Mulfinger teaches architecture at the University of Minnesota. He’s also a partner at Twin Cities-based Sala Architects and the author of The Getaway Home, published by The Taunton Press.