unusual accommodation Lake Geneva
unique lodging Lake Geneva
maximum number of persons=4
central heating/air conditioning
refrigerator
microwave
coffee maker
blender
free wi-fi
queen size bed
full size bed
use of private pier
Netflix
The main inn at Eleven Gables was built in 1867. The Ice House came nine years later, in 1876, and it has been accumulating character ever since.
What you’re staying in is a five-level structure that began its life storing ice cut from Geneva Lake and has since been transformed into one of the more architecturally singular accommodations in southern Wisconsin. The bones are original — hayloft plank floors worn smooth by a century and a half of use, exposed rafter beams overhead, large south-facing roof windows that pull light deep into the upper levels in a way that no renovation could replicate because no renovation thought to try. The four-wing layout echoes the Carpenter’s Gothic geometry of the main inn, but the Ice House arrived at its form through function rather than design, and the difference is visible in every room.
Five levels means five distinct experiences as you move through the space. The two bedrooms don’t share a floor, which gives the Ice House a privacy between sleeping quarters that most two-bedroom accommodations can’t offer. One bedroom has a queen bed and glass patio doors that open onto a private balcony — the kind of door that changes the character of a room entirely depending on whether it’s open or closed. The other bedroom sits under skylights with a built-in full bed, an arrangement that makes you conscious of the sky above in a way that conventional windows don’t. On a clear Lake Geneva night, the stars through those skylights are the last thing you see before you fall asleep.
The balcony kitchen is finished in Italian tile and steel counters — a combination that shouldn’t work in a nineteenth-century ice house and does anyway. There is also a hideaway sleep deck, which is exactly what it sounds like and requires no further justification.
The Ice House sleeps up to four and works equally well for two people who want room to spread out or four who don’t mind the vertical arrangement. It is the most private accommodation on the Eleven Gables property, operating entirely separately from the main inn, and it is the room that guests tend to describe in ways that don’t quite translate — because the experience of moving through five levels of 1876 construction, with lake light coming through roof windows and original planks underfoot, is one of those things that photographs partially and lives in full only in the staying.
From $310 night. Sleeps up to four.
Eleven Gables Inn and Cottage. Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Ninety minutes from Chicago, sixty from Milwaukee.
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