The Owners
In 2019, Harrison and I met working at Wildman Wilderness Lodge in Australia's Northern Territory, a place built for people chasing outback adventure with a bit of luxury folded in. We were both there for the same reason: we loved hosting people, and we loved being somewhere wild.
When the season ended, we didn't go home. We bought a van and made it ours for weeks at a time, working our way along the coast and taking on hospitality jobs and small property management gigs wherever we landed. The job was always the same, wherever we went: make travelers feel like they belonged, and give them the kind of tips only a local would know.
One day, on Moreton Island, we sat on the beach and wrote down our dreams. Not the kind you forget by dinner, the long kind. We wanted to build tiny homes: small spaces built around nature, where people could gather and make memories worth returning to for years.
That dream didn't stay still. When we moved to Canada, Harrison trained as a carpenter, and the tiny homes turned into cabins in our heads, a dream we are still building toward, piece by piece. Around the same time, Harrison's family sold the cottage he grew up visiting, and something in both of us wanted that back: a place that belongs to the people who love it, not just a property.
For now, that dream lives at Meer Cottage. A private point on Wollaston Lake, built for slowing down and for bringing friends and family together, with a few Dutch touches folded in alongside the Canadiana. It isn't the finished vision. It's where the vision currently lives while we keep building toward the rest of it.
Why Meer Cottage
Meer is the Dutch word for lake. It also means more. So the name carries both at once: More Cottage, and Lake Cottage, which fits, since it sits right on the water and is genuinely more than most cottages we have stayed in ourselves.
Ellen's family is from the Netherlands, so the name carries a bit of that too. Small nods to it show up around the property, alongside the old Canadiana pieces that were already part of its story before we got here.
What We're Building
Meer Cottage is not the finished picture. It is old Canadiana style right now, built for winter as much as summer, with a bit of Dutch worked in here and there, because that is genuinely who we are. Over the next few years we plan to keep building on it: a sauna, a cold plunge, eventually a bunky so more people can stay. Slowly, and mostly by hand, the same way we have built everything else so far.
We share it with people we trust, and we hope it becomes somewhere they want to keep coming back to. If you've found your way here, you're probably already part of that.