home LITTLE MODERN HOUSE IN THE BIG WOODS

BUILDING JUST THE RIGHT HOUSE ON JUST THE RIGHT SITE TOOK DECADES. BUT CAROL AND JEFF MORGAN WOULDN’T CHANGE ONE SQUARE INCH OF IT.

By ELIZABETH EDWARDS / Photos by DON RUTT

Back in the early ’90s when their family was young, the Morgans would head Up North from their home in Ann Arbor as often as they could. They camped then, trying out a variety of campgrounds in Northern Michigan, finally deciding that their favorite sites were in the Platte River Campground in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. The campground was next to everything they loved including the popular beach at the mouth of the Platte River and the secluded Boekeloo Road beach that lies down a long winding narrow lane off M-22. The hiking trails in the National Lakeshore seemed endless, and the marina in nearby Frankfort meant they could easily put their boat into Lake Michigan. On one trip, Carol nabbed a local real estate flyer and scoured it on the ride home. That was how they found the six wooded acres, backed up to the National Lakeshore on the outskirts of the tiny village of Honor, that they purchased in 2005.

Given their sons’ busy schedules, the couple was in no hurry to build. Instead, they moved a fifth-wheel camper onto their property, and eventually built a pole barn so, as Carol says: “We didn’t have to schlepp all of our toys back and forth.” Over the years the couple talked a lot about what they would want to build when the time came. They even staked out where they would want to build their future home, and cleared the site. In 2010 they added a well and septic. Still, they didn’t feel ready to build … until one day a few years back Carol was walking through a bookstore and the photo on the cover of Dwell magazine caught her eye. She purchased the issue and found out the photo was of a Lindal Cedar home, a company founded in Seattle in 1945 that specializes in pre-cut, kiln-dried Douglas fir post-and-beam style homes. The house that had caught Carol’s eye was part of a strategic move by Lindal to brand the company’s post-and-beam building system as the ultimate modern home design. “The post-and-beam system is so appropriate for modern homes because there’s no structure inside the home. It’s all carried on posts and beams from one side of the home to the other so you can have big, open floor plans,” says Rick Fulmer, the Lindal representative in Traverse City whom the Morgans contacted and eventually worked with. Beyond the open floor plans, the post-and-beam system allows for the expansive windows that are the signature of modern homes. And on an even deeper note, the clean, organic look of Lindal Homes hearkens back to the aesthetic of the pioneer of modern architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Lindal style was exactly what the Morgans came to realize they wanted. “It was modern rustic–natural and looked like it would just fit into the woods without shouting out,” Carol says. If they were sold on the style, it didn’t take long for them to become fans of their Lindal rep, Fulmer—a former president of Four

“YOU FEEL LIKE YOU ARE IN A SNOW GLOBE ESPECIALLY IN THE WINTER WHEN SNOW IS FALLING.”