The Lake Geneva Boathouse

A Sunday rerun about boathouses.

You’ve seen them. Perhaps in person, probably in pictures, and certainly at other lakes around the country. Ranging from primitive lakeside storage sheds to utilitarian boat holding garages, these waterside structures are a fixture along the waters edge of most inland lakes. Of course I think the ones on Geneva are the best, and there’s a reason for that lofty praise. You see, boathouses on Geneva vary wildly in their design and utility. Some are indeed merely small structures built to house boating supplies, and others are subterranean concrete and brick boxes originally built as pump houses to supply lakefront homes and grounds with lake water. My father has a “boathouse” of sorts on his property, but it’s really just an old ice fishing shack that found its finally resting place tucked into a corner of my dads lot overlooking the lake. Other boathouses are just raised decks with roofs perched on the lakeside of the shore path, built so to provide a restful, rain free perch for ideal lake gazing. There are dozens of these structures on Geneva, and what makes them unique isn’t only their varying design and myriad applications, it’s the fact that you just can’t build one any longer even if you had a million bucks tucked away in a drawer with a sticky note labeled “for Lake Geneva boathouse”.

The idyllic boathouse, so perfectly Geneva, isn’t something that you’re allowed to build on the shore of Geneva in this day and age. With building restrictions limiting how close to the lake you’re allowed to build a new home, the boathouse has been regulated into antique status. If you love these traditional boathouses, you’ll just have to find a property for sale that already has a boat house built on it. These boathouse owning properties do hit the market from time to time, and I sold two such lakefront homes in Williams Bay over the past decade. Once you buy a home with a boat house, you may indeed upgrade the existing boathouse, but you can’t add on to the structure, so what you see in terms of square footage is what you get.

If you’re so enamored with the idea of a boathouse, you can go as far as buying one on Geneva that has been turned into an actual home. Several of these properties exist on Geneva, with one such property being active on the open market right now. These homes are outrageously unique given their literal shoreline location. A friend of mine owned and renovated the famous Maytag boathouse on Geneva, and we actually fished off the lakeside deck of his home, a deck that actually hung out over the lake itself. No, we didn’t catch anything to talk about, but it proves my point about the location. These boathouse residences offer unparalleled wave listening, so if the sound of lapping waves puts you to sleep faster than Obama on Letterman, a boathouse might be just the ticket.

The boathouse, be it a small ice shack variety or a palatial lakeside residence, isn’t uniquely Lake Geneva, but the scarcity of these throw back buildings adds value and interest to the Geneva shoreline. If the building codes hadn’t outlawed the construction of these lakeside structures, I’d bet we’d see hundreds of them dotting the shoreline, and that wouldn’t be a good thing. The restrictive building codes have kept the old boathouses up, and kept new ones away, and preserved the integrity of the shoreline, and for that, I am eternally grateful. If boat houses are your cup of tea, let’s get out and find one that you can call your own.