Our Story

This Place’s Beauty

Leelanau County, Michigan and Tusen Takk’s 6-acre site, in particular, have a singular beauty about them. Lake Michigan dominates the landscape: an inland sea whose character changes daily, often hourly. At times, it’s a raging ocean whose waves crash against the shore with a rapidity that borders on insanity. At other times its surface is perfectly still, resembling a sheet of glass. The temperature of the Lake moderates the summer’s heat and the winter’s cold, creating the perfect climate for growing apples and cherries. Local farmers rightly boast about how this region is the largest producer of tart cherries in the United States. The springtime beauty of blossoming cherry trees covering rolling hillsides is unforgettable.

The Sparks For Tusen Takk

The unique beauty of Tusen Takk goes beyond its pristine natural setting, or rather, combines it with a different beauty, the kind that stems from the human creative process. Tusen Takk Foundation’s beginning goes back to 2008 when Tusen Takk’s Founder Geoffrey Peckham and Peter Bohlin first became friends, and Peter soon after agreed to build Geoffrey and wife Patricia’s home in Northwest Michigan. Thus began a ten-year collaboration filled with love, particularly the love of turning ideas into things.

In 2013, the Tusen Takk Main House was completed, and Geoffrey and Patricia moved from Pennsylvania into their new home. Almost immediately, in what they view as an expression of their Christian faith and their thankfulness to God, they had the desire to share this place with others. Two things then happened that led them to form a Foundation with an artist-in-residence program:

1. Their reading of a letter written by Makoto Fujimura, an acclaimed painter, describing how artists need a time and a place to create. 

2. Conversations between Geoffrey and son Thomas, an art student at the time, about transforming the cleared area across the road from their home into an artist-in-residence Guesthouse and Studios.

Geoffrey shared these ideas with Peter and he willingly agreed to design a “making place” for Tusen Takk. The topics of their many following discussions varied, but the solutions always centered on how the buildings’ functions could coexist with the feelings they wanted the spaces to evoke. Final decisions were always guided by Peter’s sense of what’s right (Peter would often say, “Not morally right, Geoffrey, just right.”). The result is a masterpiece of attached spaces that use form and materials to connect people to their surroundings. Residing at Tusen Takk is an experience akin to living and working in a three-dimensional artwork, a huge sculpture where color, surface textures, and light joyfully intersect.

Equipping the Studios and the Pilot Program

Since the completion of construction, it has been the goal of Tusen Takk’s staff to build spaces that well serve the needs of artists, writers, and composers in their creative endeavors. Thus, equipping the spaces correctly is important. Artists who use these studios need the right tools, whether the ‘tool’ is a desk in a corner-windowed space that looks out over the forest or an etching press that’s 30” wide and can produce the finest photogravures. With the feedback of Tusen Takk’s 2020-21 pilot artists, the staff ensured that the spaces were designed to accommodate these ‘tools.’ As it turned out, this creative task was both all-consuming and joyfully welcome as it overlapped with the COVID-19 crisis, giving the team something productive to accomplish during a stressful time. 

Our Collaboration with Peter Bohlin

The Tusen Takk Foundation and Geoffrey consider themselves fortunate to have Peter Bohlin as their great friend. Tusen Takk is representative of Peter’s singular genius: modernism at its best.

Peter is one of the founding principals of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. In 2010, the American Institute of Architects awarded Peter with the Gold Medal, the highest honor for an individual in the profession.

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