La CHIARA™ as featured on MLive

https://www.mlive.com/news/2023/09/a-vintage-plane-custom-treasure-hunts-await-guests-at-this-michigan-airbnb.html?utm_campaign=mlivedotcom_sf&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR1gr0nrMAPUk5CzutB8AtsINHIWw076vZqPUAay9w1Sa7cBnm3B4ReTAK8

When I was 5 and my sister was 9 my parents packed us up into the family station wagon for a road trip to Connecticut to visit a childhood friend of my father’s.

My father and I had similar childhoods in that we both spent much of them exploring streams and rivers with lifelong buddies. One of my father’s friends, Henry, would bring along a pen knife and liked to dissect the occasional dead animal they came across. Yeah sure, disturbing, but also captivating… Anyways, he became a renowned surgeon and it was his family home we took the road trip to visit.

I remember it taking a good 3 to 4 minute walk from their kitchen, through their sprawling, wide-windowed living room, down a hallway, staying to the left around a long curve to the guest wing. Fully mesmerized by this walk.

Henry and his wife Heidi put together a treasure hunt for my sister and I that to this day, over 40 years later, continues to feed my creative motivations. I wasn’t special, we all have these tendencies but the creative adult is the child who survived and I have this experience largely to credit for some of those origins.

All at once the experience instilled in me a deep desire to have my mind blown by discovery and to arrive there as efficiently as possible. Growing up since then everything else is measured against the grandeur of that treasure hunt and continues to be.

I’ve heard it said that the problem with dreamers is that they’re usually not doers but as I looked around at my peers as the years came, I saw I held the advantage of both imagining and manifesting - and I could trace it back to that single treasure hunt; a time of wide wonder but with the ticking clock of gripping a hot treasure map in my hands.

I’d imagine this philosophy impacts the young more but I could be wrong about age and creative impact so I’ll go on hoping.

When I first finished The Catcher in the Rye, I set it down and said, “Well alright that’s exactly what I want to be so how do I do that?” That is; to become that entity that preserves innocents. I’ll take it one step further and attempt to inspire a lifetime of ferocious creativity and curiosity.

It’s a greatest hope that we’re creating and releasing a group of gladiator-level, exploratory creatives into our future world, and La Chiara is the best machine I can build to produce that end. If we can inspire a lifetime of hyper curiosity we’ll have done our part. So for the price of your booking there’s what I consider a damn good chance you’re instilling in whomever you bring, a lifetime of ferocious curiosity.

And it’s my claim that the incredible power of a single treasure hunt has that capability.

Somewhere between an artist’s working studio, a rotating museum wing, outdoor grounds for sculpture, and a wonderspace for creating art yourself, you can find our beloved inn, La Chiara™ perched on the beautiful downtown bluff of Buchanan, Michigan.

La Chiara™ is a vertically split inn duplex that we’ve built into 2 lodgings which includes our Innkeeper’s Quarters. This listing is a separate postal address and is an entire half of the vertically split duplex; the upstairs and downstairs units combined, which sleeps 6 in queen beds or 8 on the foldout King.

I’m happily available to help with any issues that arise as your innkeeper as I live on premises with my wife Katrina and daughter, Chiara, year-round.

Boasting over two dozen works of art in media including photography, water color, sculpture, digital prints, laser, woodwork, printmaking, and repurposing, La Chiara™ aims to serve as an expanding, multi-faceted lodging and recreation wonderspace.

In addition to art, there is great kayaking on the St. Joseph river. La Chiara™ is located 1.2 miles from the Buchanan dam which lends itself to a spectacular downstream paddle or float from Buchanan to the Berrien Springs dam.

Outdoor activities include laying in the hammock, walking the grounds for sculpture and art, chilling on the porch swing, enjoying the breeze on your private balcony, creating original outdoor art yourself, corn hole, bocce, your custom treasure hunt and the Plane Lounge.

The Plane Lounge is a great place for coffee, wine, beer, provision or even an aviation-themed cocktail (alcohol and provisions not supplied). The Plane Lounge is a repurposed 1966 Mooney M20 fuselage - generally open from dawn till 12pm.

Mooney aircraft are part of a family of piston-powered, four-seat, propeller-driven, general aviation aircraft, all featuring low wings and tricycle gear, manufactured by the Mooney International Corporation.

Here at La Chiara™ however, the Plane Lounge is known for its exposed guts of tubes that now echo adventure with a Bluetooth speaker, a Stanley cocktail shaker set, LEDs, and a mini-fridge with some beverages to get you started.

Feel free to stock the mini fridge accordingly for your stay. We hope you find the Plane Lounge fruitful as a refreshing ambiance for conversation and ideas.

La Chiara™ is located 25 minutes from Lake Michigan and 21 minutes to The University of Notre Dame. One of our favorite aspects of living in Buchanan is access to the public kayak/boat launch 1.1 miles away that is free to use and is also free to park.

Safety for you, us, the surrounding community (most especially the Elementary School and our neighbors) is paramount. We’re honored and extraordinarily grateful to unofficially partner with the Buchanan Police Department to assist in making the neighborhood the safest possible drop-off and pick-up location for children that we can during the calendar school year as well as through their Summer programming. We have five outward facing security cameras in use: at the front doors, side windows and overlooking the Courtyard Plane Lounge. We do not allow smoking cigarettes. There is no smoking cigarettes inside, and no smoking cigarettes outside anywhere on the property.

It’s not uncommon to see an officer parked in a corner of the property so they can more easily direct school traffic and we consider ourselves very fortunate to be in a position to greater safety efforts for the Elementary School population.

Taking its name from our daughter, La Chiara™ is as much of a creative, de-risked, development tool as we could design to guide our daughter through the adventures of entrepreneurship; from the janitorial to the curatorial art direction, and finance.

Chiara does everything with me from properly cleaning the bathrooms, to supplying the art program. She currently has 5 works of art on display and from what I’ve gathered, we should expect surprise installations.

Our family is on premises and very grateful to host you as Innkeepers. We believe strongly in remediation if any issues arise. In fact, our policy for any issue that arises is for me to handle it asap, but I also share every communicated issue with my daughter Chiara. It's actually a great policy for life too; if something is wrong, what words would you choose knowing a little girl will hear them and do her best to find a solution?

Our family moved here in 2021 and it’s easy for us to see why Buchanan, Michigan was named, “Nicest Place in America 2020.” We truly hope to be a lit doorway showcasing Buchanan and adding to its growing fascination.

Finally, I leave you with this since I’ve heard it now more than twice from guests... There's healing to be found here; from wounds known and unknown. I can’t explain how but I’m eternally grateful to be part of something that has this capacity as well as the ability to hopefully inspire creative expressions and preserve forever a sense of exploration and wonderment.

We wish you travels of double the adventure and quadruple the safety!

"La Chiara: What’s rad to you?"™


Frank, Katrina and Chiara