Known as Wisconsin’s Cape Cod, Door County is a popular vacation destination in the Upper Midwest. While the area’s hospitality industry has been slow to adapt to the changing preferences and tastes of modern-day travelers, many of whom are younger and more diverse than in the past, a local developer hired Milwaukee-based Johnsen Schmaling Architects to design a contemporary alternative to the area’s dull and tiresome lodging options.
Natural metals highlight Egg Harbor Lodge, 2023 Metal Architecture Design Award winner in Natural Metals
Photo courtesy of Johnsen Schmaling Architects
Noting the refined and expressive materials, as well as the juxtaposition of the Corten panels and the flush panel siding, the judges named Egg Harbor Lodge in Egg Harbor, Wis., the winner in the Natural Metals category in the 2023 Metal Architecture Design Awards.
Perched on a grassy plateau overlooking Egg Harbor, Egg Harbor Lodge is a small vacation rental conveniently located within a five-minute walk to a variety of amenities, including a grocery store, retail, restaurants and bars, a public library and community center, as well as hiking trails. DoCo Vacation Rentals opened in 2018 with one-bedroom rentals, and after its success, was looking to add a second, complementary structure with a pair of three-bedroom units for larger families and travel groups.
“The site had originally been zoned for large-scale commercial use, but the client, after extensive studies, opted to pursue a significantly smaller development with a compact footprint, ensuring that a majority of the property would remain unencumbered,” says Sebastian Schmaling, AIA, LEED AP, principal, Johnsen Schmaling Architects.
Photo courtesy of Johnsen Schmaling Architects
Contemporary Design
Mirroring the low-slung massing of the original lodge, the new, 3,150-square-foot building is a simple, slender bar organized as a series of four adjoining modules with identical footprints, offering two spacious apartments. If demand and travelers’ preferences change in the future, the building is set up for easy subdivision into four smaller units.
“Our goal was to design a building that deliberately avoids the generic aesthetic tropes of hospitality projects nearby,” Schmaling explains. “A building that is confidently contemporary in form and detail, but also embraces the rustic precision and unvarnished materiality of the well-crafted agricultural buildings dotting the region. With a low and emphatically horizontal profile, the lodge also echoes the proud typological legacy of Midwestern roadside motels.”
Stretching across the individual modules is a thin roof slab that also extends over a small forecourt, serving as a spatial threshold between the building’s front and back. Coming from the adjacent parking lot, guests walk across the forecourt, an austere, partially covered space that’s anchored by a tree, and connects to a path leading to the rental units’ deeply recessed entryways.
Photo courtesy of Johnsen Schmaling Architects
Natural Metals
The building is decked out in a combination of corrugated metal panel siding and flush metal panel siding. “The weathering steel, sourced from a Midwest steel mill, was a perfect choice for this project, because it can be precisely fabricated and machined but at the same time provides a lively, ever-changing veneer of ferrous corrosion that allows the building to exhibit some of the rusticity of the area’s agrarian vernacular,” Schmaling notes.
Bridger Steel, Belgrade, Mont., supplied its 22-gauge Truten A606 1.25-inch by 1.25-inch corrugated panel siding. Petersen Aluminum Corp., Elk Grove Village, Ill., supplied its 22-gauge Pac-Clad flush metal panel sidings in a Matte Black Kynar finish.
As Schmaling explains, “The inherent aesthetic compatibility of different architectural metal systems—from smooth to corrugated, from Kynar-coated flawlessness to the intentional unpredictability of ferrous corrosion—made metal a perfect choice for the lodge, facilitating a set of clean, carefully assembled details that give the building a muscular, subtly sculptural presence.”
In addition to the metal siding, Bridger Steel supplied 16-gauge Truten A606 custom-bent façade fins, which are tightly spaced, helping to organize the building façade and set up a brisk vertical rhythm them tempers the perceived length of the structure. “The fins faithfully align with the continuous roof edge above,” Schmaling notes, “but the actual perimeter walls behind them run at a slight angle, gradually carving into the rectilinear building volume to create an increasingly deep façade assembly, its oblique geometry subtly eroding the conventional, sharp delineation between exterior and interior.”
The project, which was completed over 11 months during the pandemic, led the architects to limit the material selections to off-the-shelf products that were readily available. Metal offered the architects the robustness needed for a building envelope exposed to the Midwest’s hot, humid summers and long, frigid winters, while simultaneously ensuring cradle-to-cradle recyclability.