That’s One Way to Use Pandemic Office Pods

Camp Wandawega looks every bit like your classic American summer camp. The forested Wisconsin property has a dusty lodge with antlers on the walls, a lake complete with canoes, hand-painted signs, old cars—Smokey Bear would live here. Peeking at the camp’s Instagram, the vibe is undeniably Wet Hot American Summer.

Only it’s never been a place to send your kids for capture the flag, archery class, or first crushes. Established in 1925 as a lakeside resort for Chicagoans, it was a Prohibition-era haunt and a Latvian Catholic camp before becoming a retreat again in the ’60s. In 2004 it was turned into a rentable resort and event space, and since, its owners have been laying the Americana on thick. They brought in cabins from an old Girl Scout camp, added an infirmary that looks plucked from the set of Moonrise Kingdom, and more recently, released a range of cottagecore home goods. Its latest accommodations, though, are a bucket of cold water on the campfire fantasy: a pair of aluminum-framed glass boxes originally built as custom office pods.

"Honestly, they found us," says Tereasa Surratt, who owns the camp with her partner, David Hernandez. "I spotted them on Facebook Marketplace and couldn’t quite figure out what I was looking at. They were these all-glass structures sitting outside a huge auto body shop in Lake County, Illinois. I drove down to take a look, and that’s when the story got interesting."

She discovered that the structures had been custom built by the owner of the auto-repair shop during the pandemic so that insurance adjusters stopping by would have a safe place to fill out paperwork and take calls. The proprietor also happened to own a commercial glazing company and so instead of ordering prefab pods he decided to build his own. As social distancing restrictions were lifted, they were no longer needed and moved outside.

They’d withstood at least two notoriously harsh Midwestern winters, which helped convince Surratt and Hernandez that they might be a good fit as lodgings at Wandawega. "One of my favorite details of the pods is that they were designed to move," Surratt adds. "Each one has integrated forklift pockets built into their base, so they could be picked up and relocated whenever the shop needed to be reconfigured." Of course, this was also ideal for getting them up to the camp.

One of the challenges for the couple this go-round was making the pods fit in with the woodsy setting. "We stripped away everything that made them feel commercial," says Surratt, including desk brackets, panic hardware (a mechanical door latching system that lets people open emergency doors by pushing a bar), industrial trim, and other office remnants. "Off-the-shelf furniture would have wasted precious space, so we created built-in birchwood elements that fit the cabins precisely while keeping the palette intentionally quiet and minimal." The pods are perched on decks overlooking a glacial kettle; if at the auto shop they felt antiseptically corporate, now they lend a touch of clean-line modernism to the site.

Like a lot of the structures that dot Camp Wandewega’s 25 acres—an Airstream converted into a tavern and a cedar barrel turned into a sauna, for example—these recent additions reflect Hernandez and Surratt’s spirit of scrappy reinvention. The repurposing of odd pieces-of-construction, scrupulously sourced from faraway junkyards and other unlikely places, is an approach they’ve applied here since acquiring the camp. (Their home in Chicago is a former horse stable.)

The first visitors to beta-test the accommodations were two architects from Chicago firm Studio Gang, the practice behind Surratt and Hernandez’s Chicago home. They describe the experience as feeling as though they’d been suspended in the forest canopy. Custom wraparound curtains gave them privacy and views as desired. New roofs were introduced to deal with rainwater drainage, and so as not to take away from the experience of sleeping beneath the trees, they were built with translucent greenhouse panels.

"What I love most about these office pod structures is that these weren't designed by an architect or sold as a product," Surratt says. "They were purpose-built to solve one very specific problem for one family-owned business. As far as we know, these are the only two ever made. We’ve always been drawn to overlooked things that were built with ingenuity rather than prestige."

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