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Door County Christmas Home
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The living room showcases the home's
signature paneling and draws extra
charm from a coffered ceiling and a
fireplace made of local stone.
Door County Christmas Home
(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2005)
Come December, eastern Wisconsin's Door County slips into a quieter, more intimate mind-set. Most shops and inns are shuttered, and the tourists are gone from this splendid limestone peninsula bordered on one side by Lake Michigan and Green Bay on the other.
But a small group of "year-rounders" remain, including Chuck and Lana Tencate, who spend as much of the year as possible in their home on Ellison Bay. Though Chuck has a Chicago-area business, he and Lana built their Ellison Bay home with his eventual retirement in mind. The 3,400-square-foot cottage-style home fulfills a dream started decades ago when Chuck's Dutch and Swedish parents rented a cottage in Door County.
"I started coming here when I was 3 months old," says Chuck, a Chicago native. Like the peninsula's famed cherry orchards, those childhood vacations blossomed into something even sweeter: an abiding love for the area that Chuck now shares with Lana and their two daughters, Kirsten, 27, and Britta, 25.
"Chuck and I even spent our honeymoon here," Lana says. "He's definitely a man of tradition."
The winter holidays are especially magical, when the family's quiet cove freezes over and a deep hush falls over the snow-frosted woods. With virtually every room oriented toward the waterfront, the Tencates' home captures a blue-and-white tableau of ice, water and sky. Even many of the inner rooms enjoy an outlook toward the bay, thanks to charming jogs in the home's footprint and interior French doors that make water views visible throughout the house.
