Cottage Row, Fish Creek, Wisconsin
Houses along historic Cottage Row in Fish Creek, Wisconsin often have names. There's Ridgeway, Bellevue, and Cranbrook Craig, for example. However, when Robert Clark built his cottage in 1927, he felt that naming it would be too pretentious. In that light, I won't call this the Clark-Lambeau House -- but I will tell you about them in a bit.
Fish Creek is part of Door County, Wisconsin, "the Cape Cod of the Midwest." Overlooking Green Bay, it became a resort community in the late 1890's.
Cottage Row was where the wealthy built their summer homes.
Chicago businessman George Clark was the first to settle there, buying over nine acres along a two mile stretch of shoreline.
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His son Robert built this house and engineered the tank system to pipe water from the bay into the house.
The rooms are paneled in cypress.
They have had some virtual staging (normally that's my job), and it's easy to see their potential for entertaining or just curling up on that built-in bench by the bookcase.
How do you furnish a kitchen around a disconnected stove pipe? The realtor suggests hanging a picture under it:
If it were my kitchen, I'd hang a little more than that:
Now would be a good time to tell you a little more about the Clark family, because it turns out that their Chicago business was manufacturing stoves.
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These are few of their more popular models:
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I remembered seeing that cute green and white model recently...
Now that we better understand the story of the house's stove pipe, I guess a little more virtual staging is in order:
The house has 3,102 square feet with six bedrooms and three bathrooms, unfortunately not pictured in the listing.
Sometime in the 1950's the property was owned by Curly Lambeau, founder of the Green Bay Packers.
It also includes a guesthouse...
and boathouse with a fireplace and rooftop deck.
Its Wisconsin Historical Society record is a little confusing, but it did have some nice old photos:
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The listing is here.
