Decks & gardens
The house on the North Shore
A navy-blue house tucked into birch and lush, hand-tended gardens — directly on Highway 61, about a mile east of downtown Grand Marais, with Lake Superior a few minutes away and the Gunflint Trail and Boundary Waters just up the road. Long decks for slow evenings, woods out every window, and the same chemical- and fragrance-free care Martha brings to everything here. The little studio with the pink door sits in the same yard.
Two bedrooms · room for five · dates & rates on Vrbo.
View the listing on Vrbo →
The pink door
Hot yoga, the real ninety minutes
A tiny hot room built by hand — birch-shingle walls, Heating Green radiant panels, hemp insulation, Norsk eco-floors, ultrasound humidity, Lumos ERV ventilation, and the woods out the window. Every piece chosen with intention.
Ninety-minute therapeutic practice for people who already know this kind of room and rely on it as a cornerstone of their health. The room holds six students.
New students welcome on a limited basis — reach out first.
Class in session
Goat yoga, with a munch meditation
Bottle-raised Nigerian dwarf goats — the same herd that keeps the buckthorn down without chemicals — trained since they were babies to do yoga with people. Class opens with a “munch meditation,” where you simply listen to them ruminate. Then they wander, get silly, and yes, sometimes climb on you.
It's the science of animal-assisted therapy, wrapped in a lot of fun.
Up the trail with the herd
Walks in the woods
Martha has spent decades on these trails — a former Menogyn guide who still turns out to clear ski trails up the Gunflint, and who thinks nothing of leading the whole goat herd up a mossy path through the pines. Guided walks on the North Shore are taking shape.
Ask what's on offer for your season.
Timber framing & cordwood
Two old ways of building with wood — one raises the frame, the other fills the walls — both taught by hand on the North Shore, and both simpler to understand once you see them.
On the Grand Marais harbor
Heavy beams cut with chisel and mallet, locked together with wooden pegs instead of nails — frames built to outlast the people who raise them.
Martha has been at it since North House Folk School first taught her in 1999, and she teaches there now. Her favorite week of the year is when Cook County high-schoolers come down to cut a frame that goes back to the community — together they've built a bridge, a woodshed, A-frame swing sets, and a picnic-shelter outdoor classroom for a school in Duluth. She'll take on a project with you, or just have you over to build a set of sawhorse trestles in her garage.
Walls built from short log-ends set in mortar, like stone — those round faces of wood you can see are the cut ends of the logs.
It's one of the cheapest, smartest forms of sustainable building: it puts the soft, usually-wasted woods to work, insulates better than walls made from toxic materials, and it's simple enough to learn in a matter of minutes — which makes it a perfect thing to build together. Martha runs small cordwood workshops in Grand Marais each summer.
A cordwood garden house
