The American Club, Kohler WI

City living has its perks (restaurants!!), but I grew up a country girl and sometimes I just need to get out of the urban jungle.

D and I decided to head about three hours north, to Kohler Wisconsin, for a weekend at the American Club.

Kohler is a company town (sort of the plumbing version of Hershey, Pennsylvania), founded in 1912. And the American Club was built to provide housing to immigrant workers, who lived there while they earned money to eventually bring over their families. It’s a sprawling space, with long, dark wood corridors that do feel rather like an old-fashioned dormitory.

Our room, on the other hand, was bright and modern. And the bathroom – as you might expect – was about the same size as the bedroom, with crystal vessel sinks and a five-head shower.

The best part, by far, was the bathtub. It looked straightforward enough… but the faucet was in the ceiling, so filling the tub created an impressive waterfall effect!

If you’re in the mood to explore even more plumbing, there’s the Kohler Design Center just a block away – an easy walk, though the hotel provides a free shuttle just in case (really!).

The first floor is a showroom of all sorts of sinks, showers, automatic toilets, and gorgeously designed tubs. And the back wall is covered with this rather amazing display of retired toilet designs.

The basement contains a museum of the history of Kohler, from the company (and town) founding all the way through modern plumbing. I particularly enjoyed seeing the different fixtures, from the original model bathtub (an enameled trough, sold to a Wisconsin farmer for a cow and 14 chickens) to bright green and yellow 1970s toilets.

On the top floor you’ll find a series of model bathrooms and kitchens presented by different designers, from Jonathan Adler to Bunny Williams. It’s fun to poke through the warren of vignettes.

There’s not too much to do back at the American Club, which suited us just fine. We spent the rest of the afternoon doing some reading and exploring the building and its snowy courtyards.

Of course, we also made our way to a couple of dinners. The American Club has three restaurants in the main building – the Immigrant Restaurant, the Wisconsin Room, and the pub-inspired Horse & Plow – and we tried the first two.

The Immigrant Restaurant is the most elegant and upscale of the three, the white tablecloth option. It’s located in the basement, and divided into six different small dining rooms, each named after a different group that immigrated to Wisconsin. We ended up in the English room, though I was secretly hoping for something a little more interesting, like the Normandy or Danish room.

Ultimately, I wasn’t overwhelmed by the food; what’s special about the Immigrant Restaurant, however, is its wine list. The wine program follows a simple rule: “all wines on this list have received a minimum of 88 points from The Wine Spectator or Robert M. Parker’s Wine Advocate.” It’s not a rule I would institute, and I doubt many other restaurants would want to limit themselves to following it, but it does yield a high-end list. (It’s also a list that is pretty light on bargains, especially among the red wines.)

We chose a 2001 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild, which was definitely the highlight of the meal!

My second favorite part? The Wisconsin cheese selection, presented in its own multi-page menu.

You can assemble your own tasting with as much cheese as you’d care to eat. I chose Benedictine and Morbay (both from Carr Valley Cheese Company), President Brie, Pleasant Ridge Reserve, and Glacier Blue. Each different, each delicious – especially the Benedictine and the brie.

We had both breakfast and dinner at the Wisconsin Room, a big and airy dining room that is (thankfully) above ground. I admired the stained glass windows at one end, which date from back when this was the residents’ dining hall.

Breakfast is pretty standard; I was curious about the “Johnsonville Brat Patty Benedict” (hmm) but ended up sticking with the traditional version, while D had the short rib hash.

For dinner, we went all-beef: filet for me and prime rib for D. We also had a very nice butternut squash soup and bison carpaccio, and disappointingly dense “cheddar ‘n’ ale” gnocchi (yes, I probably should have known better). Once again, the wine outshone the food; to go with the American theme, we had 2001 Ridge Monte Bello, which always happily reminds me of my time living in CA.

All in all, we really enjoyed our little getaway. It’s perfect for cold weather since you can stay inside the sprawling American Club building pretty much round the clock, including walking to restaurants just down the hall.

And any place that makes taking a shower, running a bath, and even brushing my teeth into a luxurious treat is ok by me!