Living in a 1912 Schoolhouse

Artist Dana DeAno and Corey Ciszek always dreamed of having their own vacation retreat. "For a number of years my husband and I rented cabins in the Midwest thinking sometime, somehow we'd have our own," she says. During a trip to a rural Wisconsin town in the state's so-called "Driftlesss Area," they discovered that a tiny run-down schoolhouse just went up on the market. They fell in love with its quirky charms and the rolling cornfields and small farms surrounding it, and purchased the historic building in 2006.

The 1912 strucutre has been a schoolhouse up until the 1960s. "We didn't want to strip it of a one-room country schoolhouse feel. If anything, we wanted to keep it as close to original as we could," says DeAno. She modernized the kitchen, added a new staircase to the second level, and fabricated built-in cabinetry. Now, the space offers a relaxing escape from the big city.