Latarnia, a story of discovery
On top of a bluff overlooking the majestic Mississippi river, in Eastman, Wisconsin, sits one of the more unique bed and breakfasts I have come across in my travels.
This story came about when the owners of Latarnia Guest House, contacted us inquiring if their B&B could be considered for a story. After researching Latarnia, there was no doubt I would be writing this story.
First, a little background on the property and house that is Latarnia. Joseph Meyer and his way more than significant other Patti Fulton, are transplants from Chicagoland. “What motivated us to come up here, is that I had a fly shop in Chicago and was trout fishing up here. I had my on the water trout fishing school and I had a cooking school over at the Mayfly Lodge in Viroqua, Wisconsin. I've been coming up here for 25 years,” said Joseph.
One weekend, Joseph was going to head up to trout fish, and he said to Patti, “I'm going to go up see a pretty part of the country that you've never been. Why don't you come along?” She obliged. The two fished and met some of their friends and had a great time. On the way home, Patty exclaimed, “That's it. I'm retiring out of Northwestern (in Evanston, Illinois) and we're going to buy a place. We're going to move up here!” Mind you this was after only one visit to the Driftless area. The hunt began.
They looked at a lot of different places in Monroe, Crawford, Vernon, and Grant counties. “Every time we went back home, she would cry all the way to Richland Center, because she just needed to be here in the Driftless. Eventually, we found this place. We walked in the front door, she stood in the hallway, and Patti said, ‘I think we're going to take this house.’ I told her this is a 3000 square foot house. Let’s go take a look at the rest of it before making a decision.”
Patti though, instantly knew this was the place. “When I saw it, I knew we could live here. It's so beautiful. I mean, Evanston where I used to live near Northwestern University is gorgeous. The areas are wonderful. But coming here, unbelievable. And Joseph's right, one foot in the door and I said we are buying this.” Little did Joseph and Patti realize, buying their dream would be, well, on Driftless time.
Stan, the owner of the property, whom they refer to as an “old hippy and dear sweet man”, bought a bunch of property out of bankruptcy in the 70s. “He developed some home sites and built a couple of homes, then sold the other sites for people to build their own homes on. None of his homes are the same. There's a half million-dollar log home down in the woods. He said I've always wanted to build a log home. Next, he said he wanted to build a lighthouse home, and in order to show the architectural effect of the lighthouse, he wanted it to be way high up on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi. So, of the 13 homes on the bluff, ours is closest to the road, just because he wanted it to be on the highest point on the bluff,” Joseph said.
When Joseph and Patti came to look at Stan’s lighthouse home, he had been living there for 15 years. It had become too much house for him living alone. Joseph explained, “He has his woodshop next door that he built, a one bedroom, luxury apartment that he attached to his woodshop. When I say woodshop, this is what he did. All of these doors are solid core Birch, every single door in the house. The hickory flooring in the kitchen, that's Brazilian Black Cherry, and upstairs is Oak. The two end tables, the coffee table and the kitchen island he built, he didn’t use nails; they are all joined. This is the kind of wood work that he does as a hobby, master woodwork as a hobby.”
Originally coming across the home online and seeing it in person, they were determined to buy it. Joseph said they had made 13 offers that went back and forth between them and Stan. But Stan really loved the house and was very hesitant to sell. Eventually, Patti insisted on a meeting with the realtors, she said she needed to meet with Stan to let him know who they were, and “what we're all about”. They needed to get him to budge. “So, she forced this meeting and she and Stan sat down. “I was outside with our realtor while Patty was inside talking with Stan,” Joseph said. After a while, Patti and Stan emerged and they were all smiling. “I said to Stan, hey, I'm having a hard time finding the front corner of the property over here. I can't seem to find out where that is. Stan replied, ‘well it's actually the corner of her chicken coop’. As soon as he said her chicken coop, I knew that Patti had made a breakthrough.” Patti though, being from the city, kind of freaked out, exclaiming, “I don't want chickens. I'm afraid of chickens. What am I going to do with chickens?” Stan’s response, “Well I'm awfully fond of my girls. I'd hate to lose them. So, if it’s all the same to you, I'll just drag the chicken coop over to my side of the property and I'll reduce the price of the house by $3,000.” Joseph admitted they dodged a bullet on that one. “Once he moved the chicken coop, there is no level ground on our three acres, nothing is level except for where the chicken coop was. That's now where the sauna sits, so it was a win-win for everybody.” They officially closed on the house in November of 2021 and moved in full time in February 2022.
But the chicken saga did not end there as Joseph explained. “He called us in March the first year we were here and he said, ‘you know it's starting to get to be tick season’. And I said yeah, I kind of figured that, were out in the woods. And he says, ‘you know who love to eat a lot of ticks? Chickens. Chickens eat a lot of ticks. This is my way of sharing with you. I really haven't had a conversation with the girls to let them know they don't live there anymore. So, if I let them out of their coop, and you see them down in your woods and across your lawn, you're okay with that?’. So, we have we have chicken neighbors,” Joseph said smiling.
Moving to the Driftless has been a major change for both of them, especially Patti. Joseph said on their social media, he refers to her as “the city girl”. “Until we moved here, Patti had never driven on a gravel road, never used her cruise control on her car. Using the high beams was a total foreign concept to her. I lived in Des Plaines, Illinois and I suffered from all of the ambient light from O'Hare. The first weekend we stayed up here, it was overcast, and Patti is like, this is, this is like dark dark. This is like severe dark. A couple of nights later, the sky was very clear, and there was a full moon. She wakes me up at three o'clock in the morning and said, ‘you left the light on, you need to get up and shut the light off.’ I'm like, that’s the moon coming through the bedroom window. That's how bright it is.” “It looked like daylight,” Patti added.
There move as they explained, put them in a whole new world. A world that they fell in love with. “The people here are wonderful. They couldn't be more welcoming. And it's just nice to be here. It's nice to walk to visit your neighbor. It's nice to give them a call and say you want to come over?”, Patti shared. Joseph added, “We have more friends here than we do in Chicago, and people know us. We move to a small town and they know that we're from Chicago. They refer to us as one of the blow-ins, as in they just blew in from Chicago. We also met some really interesting creative producers and makers of products. I retired out of retail, and after working 60 hours a week and then being retired, I was itching, I needed to do something with my hands. So, I worked for the Viroqua Food Co Op. I was a grunt in the produce department. I'm like, I don't want to have to make any decisions, no responsibilities. I want to take the parsley out of the box, put it on the shelf and go home,” he said chuckling.
Now that we’ve got some of the how they came to the Driftless and found their forever home, let’s get to the bed and breakfast.
“The house was bigger than we really need for just the two of us,” said Joseph. “We have areas of the house that we're able to rent out. I come from a hospitality background, so that was just kind of natural, and Patti has never met a stranger in her entire life. We would be at Johnson's one stop and I'll be talking to Brad or Jordan in the butcher shop, and Patti is down talking to somebody who I don’t know giving them a hug. And I’m like, well, I'm going to be cooking dinner for somebody tonight. So, we just kind of fell into it.” So, they branded their place, naming it Latarnia, which is the Polish word for lighthouse. Joseph said it fit well with Patti’s Polish heritage. “It’s just fun,” Patti added.
Guests to Latarnia are treated to gourmet meals prepared by Chez Joseph, and amazing baked goods made by Patti. Joseph also offers cooking classes at Latarnia for guests and to the public with registration through their website. Joseph and Patti were recently featured on LaCrosse TV station WKBT’s Foodie Friday segment. Over time, meeting organic farmers, visiting Vernon Vineyards Winery, and different people, proved to be the catalyst to hold cooking classes at Latarnia. “Patti said it would be interesting to host a producer here for dinner. People could come and interact with them and learn their story the way we have, cooking an entire meal based on their product. So, we set up a meet the maker series of dinners with Tiffany Cade from Deep Rooted organics in Westby. She grows organic tomatoes, microgreens and flowers. People could learn her story and we were able to show off her product. Then, we had Ryan Wagner and his wife Kristen of Driftless Provisions who make salami and smoke meats. Ryan's shared his story of going from being a civil engineer in Madison to making salami, which he had never done before. We made an entire meal based on his product. We hosted a meal with Amy and Travis Forgues, the owners of Hidden Springs Creamery in Westby that milk 600 head of sheep. They're amazing people that moved here from Vermont. The fourth dinner, we had John and Deanna Pedretti from Vernon Vineyards just outside Viroqua. It was fascinating to learn his story coming from Menards, and why he is a vineyard and not a winery. So, learning with those producers, working with their products was just amazing. Where we come from, Chicago, we have access to international everything. Our social lives changed in that we were not on the secret email list go to the opening of the gourmet Greek restaurant in Winnetka. We don't do that anymore. We don't have a lot of exposure to a lot of cuisines.”
Latarnia Guest House boasts a master guest room and a second guest room that as Joseph puts it, is great for a couple that want to bring their kids or another couple with them. There are not many rooms that don’t have a breath-taking view, with most rooms in the house opening up to a tri-level deck overlooking the Mississippi.
Guests also have full access to the couple’s beautiful Finnish sauna. “Patti’s heritage is Polish, my heritage is Finnish, and you're talking about sacred spaces. In the Finnish culture sauna is their sacred space. In Finland, there's 3.2 million people and there are 2.3 million saunas. We had the space. It's something that I wanted to do. I met a very cool guy Joel in Viroqua that builds saunas. I started talking with him, and we realized by virtue of our family's last names, that a generation or so ago, our families probably ran together near Ashland, Wisconsin. Two or three generations or so ago, they ran together on the Russia/Finland border below Lapland. We bonded over sauna and he custom built a sauna for us. Joel and I, we have it in our blood. Patti started to accept it. So, our sauna is a refuge. It's a quiet space, it's meditative. It's where we can go and count blessings rather than catalogue regrets. Sauna is super important to us and we'd like to share that with others, which is why we also rent out our sauna. It's so meaningful for us, especially for me as a Fin.”
No doubt that Joseph and Patti have made a life changing move that has benefitted them in many ways. But the Driftless area has that effect. As time carries on, Joseph said when they get to the age where they’re no longer stair worthy, they will move into the downstairs bedroom and probably rent out the upstairs bedroom. Short term, he said they will continue to expand their ‘Meet the Maker’ dinner series. With a passion in his voice Joseph said, “We're so appreciative of everything and everyone. It's important to us we serve local beer, because we know the people that brew it. We serve Vernon Vineyards’ wine because we know them and the work it took to produce. And there's that connection that we've made and people have embraced us, which we're deeply appreciative of being welcomed as Chicago people. When we were moving up here, our Chicago friends are like you know, they don't like Chicago people up there. They've got that bad nickname for them. We haven't experienced that. We're learning. We've accepted the concept, but we have yet to embrace the concept of where things take forever, and ‘I'll get back to you’ probably doesn't mean I'll get back to you. Patti added, “Long term, this is this is our forever home. We're not going anywhere. This has not been a culture shock, it's just a discovery for both of us”.
Be sure to view the video provided by Latarnia Guest House below the photo gallery.
Visit the Latarnia Guest House on the web, or visit their Facebook page.
