When Jim Mattson and his family want to get away from it all, they head to the ultimate Minnesota getaway spot: a rustic log home Up North, set on secluded acres of woods and more than 900 feet of lake shoreline.
The lake is Burntside, known for its 100 islands and its clear water -- so clean that it supplies drinking water for the city of Ely. "It's a deep, cold lake -- you can see the bottom in close to 30 feet of water," said Mattson.
For more than a dozen years, Mattson, his wife and their two daughters, now young adults, commuted from Plymouth to their North Woods retreat just about every weekend.
"You can use it year-round, and there's stuff to do all the time," Mattson said, including swimming, boating and trout fishing in summer; snowshoeing, cross-country skiing and ice fishing in winter. "There's a snowmobile trail right by the house."
The Mattsons built the 5,000-square-foot house in 1998 with plenty of room for their family and friends. It has five bedrooms, three bathrooms, a big gourmet kitchen, a four-season sunroom and three wood-burning fieldstone fireplaces that took three months of stonework to complete. "There's nothing like a stone fireplace," Mattson said.
But even though the house is outfitted with "all the bells and whistles," according to listing agent Charlie Chernak of Bear Island Land Co., the Mattsons also wanted to make sure the house had a rustic character to complement its setting, which is just a quarter-mile from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
"We were fanatical," Mattson said. "We wanted a Boundary Waters-type experience," not a suburban-style home.
That's why they hired builder/craftsman John Huisman to construct the house using cedar logs from British Columbia. Each log was hand-scribed to fit the log next to it, for a snug fit that doesn't require filling gaps with mortar. "All you see is logs," Mattson said.
